Ext3 vs NTFS performance

Cabot, Mason B
2007-05-01T20:43:25Z

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

(please CC responses to mason dot b dot cabot at intel dot com)