5 ms·

I have a suspicion that APFS is partly to blame. When I saw benchmarks of APFS vs. HFS+ [0, 1], it appeared that Apple had managed to transition to a filesystem

I have a suspicion that APFS is partly to blame. When I saw benchmarks of APFS vs. HFS+ [0, 1], it appeared that Apple had managed to transition to a filesystem that is markedly slower at reads and writes than the 20 year old one it was replacing. [0] https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_speed_comparison_small4.png https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_... [1] https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_latency_with_scale_from_zero-1.png https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_...

henrikeh 9y ago
Yet also transitioning to a filesystem with actual checks for integrity and many features which improve performance for, f.x. Time Machine.
mpweiher 9y ago
As I wrote in the article, I already accounted for this. The raw combined performance degradation was 4x. APFS itself seems to be around 20%. Now that is somewhat rough, as APFS degradation may itself by non-linear. However, others have measured the pure APFS costs and they seem to be roughly what I saw: https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-performance-lags-hfs/ https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-performance-lags-h...
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  That’s weird because the article states it works better on spinning media but it is only offered automatically on SSD.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Could you please disable that annoying behavior where scrolling slightly left or right swaps to a different article? It’s hard so imagine anyone actually uses that and it is extremely annoying.
  - FreeFull 9y ago
    That's a problem with the Blogger platform, it might not be possible to disable that behaviour without switching to something else entirely.
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      Have you ever heard of the expression "How do you know someone disables javascript on the internet through an add-on? They'll tell you"? No? Well, anyway, one draconic way to fix this is installing something like uMatrix or NoScript. This particular website works fine without JS.
      - na85 9y ago
        The web is better as a whole without js
        kristofferR 9y ago
        It would suck if you had to refresh the page here on HN for every upvote.
        lugg 9y ago
        Nah, we'd just have check boxes and a submit at the bottom of the page and we'd call it UX.
        pshc 9y ago
        Kind of a cool hack: I believe HN used to record upvotes through a CSS rule that (when clicked) caused an empty image to load. No JS required.
        na85 9y ago
        Upvoting adds nothing but the capacity for groupthink. See what voting has done to the level of discourse on reddit. The larger the community, the worse the problem. If we couldn't vote on comments asyncrhonously (or, IMHO at all), nothing of value would be lost.
makecheck 9y ago
Even if that is the case, you also have to account for situations where APFS requires far fewer writes entirely (such as, apparently, duplication of files). In a typical aggregate workflow it’s entirely possible that it’s still a better design.

henrikeh 9y ago

Yet also transitioning to a filesystem with actual checks for integrity and many features which improve performance for, f.x. Time Machine.

mpweiher 9y ago

As I wrote in the article, I already accounted for this. The raw combined performance degradation was 4x. APFS itself seems to be around 20%. Now that is somewhat rough, as APFS degradation may itself by non-linear. However, others have measured the pure APFS costs and they seem to be roughly what I saw: https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-performance-lags-hfs/ https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-performance-lags-h...

tinus_hn 9y ago
That’s weird because the article states it works better on spinning media but it is only offered automatically on SSD.
tinus_hn 9y ago
Could you please disable that annoying behavior where scrolling slightly left or right swaps to a different article? It’s hard so imagine anyone actually uses that and it is extremely annoying.
- FreeFull 9y ago
  That's a problem with the Blogger platform, it might not be possible to disable that behaviour without switching to something else entirely.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    Have you ever heard of the expression "How do you know someone disables javascript on the internet through an add-on? They'll tell you"? No? Well, anyway, one draconic way to fix this is installing something like uMatrix or NoScript. This particular website works fine without JS.
    - na85 9y ago
      The web is better as a whole without js
      - kristofferR 9y ago
        It would suck if you had to refresh the page here on HN for every upvote.
        lugg 9y ago
        Nah, we'd just have check boxes and a submit at the bottom of the page and we'd call it UX.
        pshc 9y ago
        Kind of a cool hack: I believe HN used to record upvotes through a CSS rule that (when clicked) caused an empty image to load. No JS required.
        na85 9y ago
        Upvoting adds nothing but the capacity for groupthink. See what voting has done to the level of discourse on reddit. The larger the community, the worse the problem. If we couldn't vote on comments asyncrhonously (or, IMHO at all), nothing of value would be lost.

makecheck 9y ago

Even if that is the case, you also have to account for situations where APFS requires far fewer writes entirely (such as, apparently, duplication of files). In a typical aggregate workflow it’s entirely possible that it’s still a better design.