3 ms·
I'd love to hear technical explanations of the differences in performance for the most popular Linux filesystems (ext4, XFS, BTRFS, ZFS) vs. APFS and ZFS on mac
by pxc 2y ago
I'd love to hear technical explanations of the differences in performance for the most popular Linux filesystems (ext4, XFS, BTRFS, ZFS) vs. APFS and ZFS on macOS. But differences are certainly very noticeable between the ext4 Linux VMs on my personal Mac and the native APFS filesystem for anything that touches lots of files (compiling big programs, basically any Nix commands).
I've not thought about performance specifically, but I've always thought of Linux's great filesystem support in terms of breadth, features, and activity of development as a consequence of Linux's place in the server world. People run storage at incredible scale on Linux, and then mere desktop users can take advantage of the same tech on their laptops and it works pretty well. I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well.
I imagine that if Apple were still targeting the server market and it were a big part of their revenue, filesystem features and performance on macOS would look more like how they do on Linux.
- throwaway1194 2y ago> I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well. Indeed, that's a huge advantage of Linux, the fact that we all run the same Linux kernel and benefit from improvements coming from all directions. Linus himself mentions this advantage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2330 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2330 There's a nice recent benchmark here (Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS): https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-filesystems https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-filesystems Bcachefs is starting to look really good against Btrfs, no APFS or ZFS though, but still interesting nonetheless.