Re: Ext3 vs NTFS performance

[David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>]

On Tue, May 01, 2007 at 11:54:04PM -0400, Gerhard Mack wrote:
> On Tue, 1 May 2007, Cabot, Mason B wrote:
> 
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > I've been testing the NAS performance of ext3/Openfiler 2.2 against
> > NTFS/WinXP and have found that NTFS significantly outperforms ext3 for
> > video workloads. The Windows CIFS client will attempt a poor-man's
> > pre-allocation of the file on the server by sending 1-byte writes at
> > 128K-byte strides, breaking block allocation on ext3 and leading to
> > fragmentation and poor performance. This will happen for many
> > applications (including iTunes) as the CIFS client issues these
> > pre-allocates under the application layer.
> > 
> > I've posted a brief paper on Intel's OSS website
> > (http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1259.htm). Please give
> > it a read and let me know what you think. In particular, I'd like to
> > arrive at the right place to fix this problem: is it in the filesystem,
> > VFS, or Samba?
> > 
> > thanks,
> > Mason 
> > 
> 
> Just out of curiosity do other filesystems(reiser, xfs) take the same 
> performance hit?

XFS was also tested - it is as fast as the Windows NTFS based
server.....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group