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http://www.macnn.com/articles/03/05/20/os.x/

OS X Filesystem Performance Comparison

updated 09:25 am EDT, Tue May 20, 2003

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MacNN reader Jason Titus notes that that he has written up a : "I just finished a long set of benchmarking and analysis of how well the various filesystems perform on Mac OS X and thought you might be interested in checking out the results. I used IOZone to benchmark HFS+ w/ and w/o journaling, HFS, UFS, and ext2 (using the alpha driver on SourceForge by Brian Bergstrand). Nothing too surprising, but I found it interesting that HFS+ was not that much better than some of the others. Ext2 seems like it has some potential to me - while it is much slower in small writes, it is faster in some reads, and hasn't even been optimized yet."

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05/20, 10:31am | report spam | close Reply |
Where's HFS+

He says he tested HFS+, but only shows journaling results.

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05/20, 11:03am | report spam | close Reply |
Obvious

He's getting paid by Micro$oft.

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05/20, 11:54am | report spam | close Reply |
Hello, excuse me...

I represent Apple's attorney's and I'm am asking you to cease and desist with your despicable and amateurish attempt to benchmark Mac OS X and make the general public aware of any short-comings that it may have.

Any further attempt to help the unwashed come to a pre-purchase decision regarding OS X shall be met with general unhappiness on the part of Apple, and it's management. We reserve the right to cry uncontrollably and waste as much time as possible sending letters and making threats. We also reserve the right to flick your s****** with a tea towel if you come anywhere near us.

thank you

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05/20, 12:16pm | report spam | close Reply |
HFS+ by comparison

He has a chart on the HFS+ w/Journaling data set that shows comparisons to HFS+ w/o Journaling. I don't know who he intended to read this stuff - it is all just arrays of numbers. Any serious study should have at least included graphical summary charts for a good overview analysis. This is too much work (and the download took forever)

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05/20, 12:18pm | report spam | close Reply |
Why Microsoft?

He doesn't do any comparisons to Microsoft products or technologies. As I see it his only shortcoming was not performing the study in a format from which conclusions could be drawn (without excessive analysis).

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05/20, 12:20pm | report spam | close Reply |
A for effort but...

The tests should have been performed with a greater number of runs. The results really should have been averaged and presented with some measure of dispersion.

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05/20, 12:21pm | report spam | close Reply |
re: Hello, excuse me

flick your s****** with a tea towel?

Wow.

That's gotta hurt.

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05/20, 01:16pm | report spam | close Reply |
Sjut-up

Shut-up. All of you.

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05/20, 02:16pm | report spam | close Reply |
Slooooooooow

A $3,000 dual G4 seems really slow compared to a $700 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 PC.

Highlight 500 html files and move them. Ouch!!!

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05/20, 03:06pm | report spam | close Reply |
He forgot one.

What about MFS? ;)

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05/20, 03:11pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: Slooooooow

What are you talking about?

mv olddir/*.html newdir/

It's quick! Although I see your point, even though I can't imagine having 500 html files in one folder.

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05/20, 03:28pm | report spam | close Reply |
I wouldn't trust his res

I wouldn't trust his resu lts. The guy can't even write a basic web page without resorting to so totally invalid .htm c*** and then he blames Netscape for it's display problems?

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05/20, 03:36pm | report spam | close Reply |
I wouldn't trust his res

{Sorry all, clicked too soon}

I wouldn't trust his reults. First he notice wide variations in his numbers, so he just took the highest of four runs. What stat class did he take? I would expect anybody that stayed awake during High School math to at least use an average of the runs. There's no statistical validity in anything he did. the numbers are worse than worthless because they're misleading. Second, he used some non-standard .htm c*** that looks like the totally invalid "HTML" output from Excel and blames Netscape for the rendering problems. This guy seems worse than the BareFeats guy.

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05/20, 05:28pm | report spam | close Reply |
Yet another...

unscientific benchmark report. Besides broken links, no info on the test condidtions, no statistical analysis, graphs etc. If this guy ever decides to take a science or engineering course when he goes to college, he'll wake up to some harsh realities.

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05/20, 06:34pm | report spam | close Reply |
UFS & EXT2 are obsolete

UFS and EXT2 are old filesystems and aren't any better than HFS+. The fastest filesystem is Silicon Graphics' XFS, which is also available for Linux.

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05/21, 02:35pm | report spam | close Reply |
Who cares about fast?

Come on. Bechmarking filesystems? How bout introducing a friggin metadata filesystem already? Instead we went backwards: back to file extentions for type. Bah.

Filesystems today (at least the standard windows/mac filesystems) are from the stone age. It's time to throw out that c*** and start over.

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05/21, 02:55pm | report spam | close Reply |
Free your mind.

http://www.petitiononline.com/osxmd/petition.html

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06/26, 01:46pm | report spam | close Reply |
UFS comments.

Traditionally UFS has been an unexceptional performer... it's designed for reliability and robustness at least as much as for speed, and has had some really conservative algorithms in it for a long time. So, until the recent changes with Soft Updates were implemented it had been a relatively poor performer. The UFS in Jaguar is a pretty old implementation, and I doubt if it supports SOft Updates.

Panther has a new port of UFS, and should be considerably faster (some operations are literally hundreds of times faster now, though you're only likely to see that kind of speedup when moving or deleting lots of small files).

If they can also get UFS to handle resource forks and finder info (which may be possible in newer UFS) I'm tempted to upgrade to Panther just for that. And right now I'm not anticipating going anywhere with Panther unless that new Finder is optional. :P

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06/26, 01:49pm | report spam | close Reply |
UFS comments.

Traditionally UFS has been an unexceptional performer... it's designed for reliability and robustness at least as much as for speed, and has had some really conservative algorithms in it for a long time. So, until the recent changes with Soft Updates were implemented it had been a relatively poor performer. The UFS in Jaguar is a pretty old implementation, and I doubt if it supports SOft Updates.

Panther has a new port of UFS, and should be considerably faster (some operations are literally hundreds of times faster now, though you're only likely to see that kind of speedup when moving or deleting lots of small files).

If they can also get UFS to handle resource forks and finder info (which may be possible in newer UFS) I'm tempted to upgrade to Panther just for that. And right now I'm not anticipating going anywhere with Panther unless that new Finder is optional. :P

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06/26, 02:56pm | report spam | close Reply |
Metadata

I do not support the metadata proposal as written, but I do not believe that Apple's current implementation is correct either.

File names should never be modified by the user interface: when displaying or opening a file, the entire unique identfier should be displayed. Apple has a rich user interface, it should use that to the fullest, by shading the file extension or making it partially transparent, but not hide it.

There does not need to be a 1:1 mapping between on-disk file objects and names as presented to or enumerated by an application. The traditional reason for avoiding multiple file-system objects is that it means that a file can be amaged when accessed through other APIs. Since that is already the case, this should not be a consideration.

A better solution would be:

1. File extensions should not be hidden by the user interface. They should be uniformly downplayed, but remain visible.

2. Applications should not determine the types of files directly, but should have a call that performs that operation for them. This API should use all the finformation available.

3. External APIs should see a consistent view of rich file system objects, with the resource fork and finder info presented as additional files using a consistent convention. File systems that don't provide rich objects should be hidden from applications, and the OS should transparently create and manage the additional files.

This would preserve current behaviour without penalising any of the APIs and interfaces on the system. It's a clean extension of the way MacOS already handles applications.

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OS X Filesystem Performance Comparison

updated 09:25 am EDT, Tue May 20, 2003

Where's HFS+

Obvious

Hello, excuse me...

HFS+ by comparison

Why Microsoft?

A for effort but...

re: Hello, excuse me

Sjut-up

Slooooooooow

He forgot one.

Re: Slooooooow

I wouldn't trust his res

I wouldn't trust his res

Yet another...

UFS & EXT2 are obsolete

Who cares about fast?

Free your mind.

UFS comments.

UFS comments.

Metadata

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OS X Filesystem Performance Comparison

updated 09:25 am EDT, Tue May 20, 2003

Related Articles

Recent Articles

Where's HFS+

Obvious

Hello, excuse me...

HFS+ by comparison

Why Microsoft?

A for effort but...

re: Hello, excuse me

Sjut-up

Slooooooooow

He forgot one.

Re: Slooooooow

I wouldn't trust his res

I wouldn't trust his res

Yet another...

UFS & EXT2 are obsolete

Who cares about fast?

Free your mind.

UFS comments.

UFS comments.

Metadata

Login Here

Register for our weekly email newsletter:

Connect tools:

Subscribe

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Most Read

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MacNN Marketplace