Recent Advances in Applied & Biomedical Informatics and Computational Engineering in Systems Applications Ext4 file system Performance Analysis in Linux Environment BORISLAV DJORDJEVIC, VALENTINA TIMCENKO Mihailo Pupin Institute University of Belgrade Volgina 15, Belgrade SERBIA
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[email protected] Abstract: - This paper considers the characteristics and behavior of the modern 64-bit ext4 file system under the Linux operating system, kernel version 2.6. It also provides the performance comparison of ext4 file system with earlier ext3 and ext2 file systems. The testing procedures and further analysis are performed using the Postmark benchmark application. Key-Words: - Linux, FileSystems, ext4/ext3/ext2, journaling, inodes, file block allocation, disk performances 1 Introduction large number of file operations (creation, reading, Ext4 file system is the ext3 file system successor. It writing, appending and file deletion). It comprises is supported on today’s most popular Linux large number of files and data transactions. distributions (RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora). In contrast Workload can be generated synthetically, as a result to the 32-bit ext3 file system [1] [2], that has only of applying benchmark software, or as a result of working with some real data applications. some features added to its predecessor ext2 and Workload characterization is a hard research maintains a data structure as in the ext2 file system, problem, as arbitrarily complex patterns can the ext4 file system has integrated more substantial frequently occur. In particular, some authors chose changes compared to ext3. Ext4 has improved data to emphasize support for spatial locality in the form structure and enhanced features, which brought of runs of requests to contiguous data, and temporal more reliability and efficiency.