I recently came across a benchmark from Phoronix that shows Btrfs, which I've been using for about three years now, is trailing behind in performance compared to other filesystems. I'm curious if this performance drop is something noticeable during regular usage like desktop tasks or gaming. I really rely on Btrfs for its compression features, and I'm only willing to switch to something like XFS if it offers a significant performance boost. What's the consensus on this?
2 Answers
It might be noticeable, but probably not unless you're running tests or handling large databases. For everyday desktop use or gaming, the differences are likely overshadowed by other factors in your system. As a software professional, I think it only matters if you have a specific task that’s slowed down by your current filesystem—then you'd want to see solid evidence that switching will help.
The performance really depends on what you’re doing. If you're loading large game files that don't compress well, XFS could definitely be faster for that. Interestingly, XFS also supports Copy-On-Write (COW) and can do snapshots, similar to Btrfs, but it seems not many tools utilize that feature well. Personally, I switched to XFS after encountering a kernel bug with Btrfs that risked data corruption, and I’m more comfortable with it now.
Just to clarify, when we say it's noticeable, we really mean it’s measurable, not that you'll feel it during normal use. If it doesn't impact your experience, then it's not perceptible.