# Try Btrfs if you are installing to an ssd



## johnspack (Feb 24, 2018)

I did multiple tests in vms,  and found btrfs to be significantly faster than ext4 on an ssd.  Not recommended for storage drives.
Ubuntu runs stupid fast on it,  and if you have 32gbs ram or more,  you don't need the swap file. Even 16 would probably do it.


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## theFOoL (Feb 25, 2018)

This isn't new known for 3 years


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## eidairaman1 (Feb 25, 2018)

rk3066 said:


> This isn't new known for 3 years



Not everyone knows...


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## Aquinus (Feb 25, 2018)

johnspack said:


> I did multiple tests in vms,  and found btrfs to be significantly faster than ext4 on an ssd.  Not recommended for storage drives.
> Ubuntu runs stupid fast on it,  and if you have 32gbs ram or more,  you don't need the swap file. Even 16 would probably do it.


Do you have numbers to back that up? I would be intrigued if you do. Phoronix has short article on the matter and it looks like the only case where it was faster was using SQLite, it was as fast or slower with all the other benchmarks. I would expect any machine with more memory to go faster regardless of the type of file system because the file system and certain files are more likely to be cached.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-412-fs&num=2


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## GoldenX (Feb 25, 2018)

It is indeed good, but the problem is the repair software when somerhing goes wrong, it's not as good as in EXT4.


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## xorbe (Feb 26, 2018)

Phoronix results don't agree.  They showed ext4 to be the most well rounded.  Also, there is a steady stream of dead btrfs partitions that pass through the opensuse forum.  Just changing the fs isn't going to transform your distro into "stupid fast".  And why would changing the fs have ANY bearing on whether you need a swap file for your PC or not?  That's application dependent.


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## Aquinus (Feb 26, 2018)

xorbe said:


> And why would changing the fs have ANY bearing on whether you need a swap file for your PC or not?


Forget the part where swap gets its own *partition* on a disk and isn't even stored on a file system on *nix machines.


xorbe said:


> That's application dependent.


It's memory usage dependent in the *nix world. They're just like any other memory page which is probably why being its own partition makes sense. It's easy to map memory addresses to addresses on a physical disk while maintaining relatively reasonable performance. No file system overhead for virtual memory.


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## johnspack (Feb 27, 2018)

Alright, not new,  but much more stable now.  I've only been pushing linux for like six months now so,  cool it.  Before installing ubuntu on my main rig, I tested 2 identical installs of kubuntu in vms,  running off the same ssd.  Only one at a time.  Results were repeatable at least 20x. btrfs-tools do exist now,  no reason not to install.  Tests, first is ext4,  2nd is btrfs:


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## Aquinus (Feb 27, 2018)

That looks like the VM host doing caching like a pro. That doesn't look like anything to do with btrfs. Do the same benchmarks on a machine outside of a VM without write-back caching the size of system memory and we'll have a good discussion but, this just looks like vmware getting creative. If anything, those constantly low points probably show the actual file system performance without caching. Even my RAID-0 with SSDs maintains closer to what you would expect from two SATA-3 devices in RAID-0. No file system will mysteriously make a drive faster than it actually is.


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## johnspack (Feb 27, 2018)

I'll try some raw numbers and post those.  I'll have to install another kubuntu on my 2nd equal ssd I guess.  I don't understand why you can't see the difference,  but okay.
Still compiling a list of windows games that run just fine under winehq wine right now...  much more important....Oh,  here's my ancient old system using btrfs raw:


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## xorbe (Feb 27, 2018)

Linux has always mapped swap to a dedicated partition ... you have to work extra hard to put in on a loopback device on a mounted fs, which is suicide in low mem conditions ...


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## johnspack (Feb 27, 2018)

I also have Phoronix suites installed.  In the case of btrfs though,  there is no swap file.  Not using tmp dir...  I've never seen numbers like this under windows.  Except with magician.  Just under 600mbs isn't cached though.
Raw numbers.  Well I can't argue anymore,  I'm just going to tweak this bi0tch,  and take over the world....


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## xorbe (Feb 28, 2018)

I suppose it could be faster within a VM for some unexpected reason / interaction with the particular host system.


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## johnspack (Mar 1, 2018)

Yes,  it's obvious vmware is doing some caching work...  I'll have to do a clean install raw using ext4 to compare fully.  I'm still happy with btrfs performance on my raw install,  no issues,  no errors.  And I'm pushing my install.  I want to break it,  to see it's limits.  So far btrfs and ubuntu just friggin rock.....


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## Bellusterra (May 23, 2018)

Aquinus said:


> No file system will mysteriously make a drive faster than it actually is.



btrfs wiki page says that it does actually increase the throughput if that helps.

"SSD (flash storage) awareness (TRIM/Discard for reporting free blocks for reuse) and optimizations (e.g. avoiding unnecessary seek optimizations, sending writes in clusters, even if they are from unrelated files. This results in larger write operations and faster write throughput)"

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page


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## theFOoL (May 23, 2018)

Yea even on My HDD it boots faster and access faster. Don't know why Linux doesn't have it as default


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## Bellusterra (May 24, 2018)

According This This Benchmark:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux414-fs-compare&num=2







It looks like Where btrfs Performs Well Is in The Sequential Read Which would make sense why it is booting and accessing things faster. where it runs slower is the sequential writing to the disk, it performs other functions at this time, which would also make sense why it would be slower.


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## eidairaman1 (May 24, 2018)

Bellusterra said:


> According This This Benchmark:
> 
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux414-fs-compare&num=2
> 
> ...



At that point it wouldn't be worth using it considering the reads aint drastically better and the writes are drastically worse than the other formats.


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## theFOoL (May 24, 2018)

As I mentioned  before btrfs just needs some work. It's still new to a lot of people. I used it in mint 17.3 and it had some issues with reading and writing to the drive


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## therealmeep (May 24, 2018)

I have somewhat felt this at least on my laptop with suse/centos/fedora in btrfs and mint/ubuntu/arch/parrot/gentoo in ext4. The boot time for fedora is faster than mint, however writing is much faster in mint.


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## theFOoL (May 24, 2018)

That's because MINT is better optimized...


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