Zfs & ext3

SOLARIS™ ZFS AND RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX EXT3

FILE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
White Paper June 2007

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Executive Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: File System Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Solaris™ ZFS . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Simplified Storage Device and File System Administration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Pooled Storage and Integrated Volume Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Strong Data Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 4 Immense Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ext3 File System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Logging in the ext3 File System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 File System Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Chapter 3: Benchmark Tests and Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Reproducing the Benchmark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Hardware and Operating System Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 IOzone FileSystem Benchmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 IOzone Test Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 PostgreSQL and BenchW — A Data Warehousing Benchmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 BenchW Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 BenchW Test Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Postmark — A Web and Mail Server Benchmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Postmark Test Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Chapter 4: Summary . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 For More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Appendix A: BenchW SQL Used During Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

1

Executive Overview

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Chapter 1

Executive Overview
TheSolaris™ 10 06/06 Operating System (OS) introduces a major new data management technology — the Solaris ZFS file system. Replacing the traditionally separate file system and volume manager functionality found in most operating environments, Solaris ZFS provides immense capacity and performance coupled with a proven data integrity model and simplified administrative interface. Today, file systems aim toprovide efficient access to data storage and information. While traditional UNIX® file systems and Solaris ZFS alike can benefit from additional performance enhancements, the performance profile and characteristics of Solaris ZFS are qualitatively different from file systems such as the ext3 file system used in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Enterprise Server environment and similar architectures. Thiswhite paper explores the performance characteristics and differences of Solaris ZFS and the ext3 file system through a series of benchmarks based on use cases derived from common scenarios, as well as the IOzone File System Benchmark (IOzone benchmark) which tests specific I/O patterns. Testing results reveal: • Solaris ZFS outperforms the ext3 file system in tests that represent the storage and data...