Grant Miner posted some interesting benchmark results to the lkml, comparing five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories, performing several syncs in between. He summarizes:

- ext3's syncs tended to take the longest [at] 10 seconds, except
- JFS took a whopping 38.18s on its final sync
- xfs used more CPU than ext3 but was slower than ext3
- reiser4 had highest throughput and most CPU usage
- jfs had lowest throughput and least CPU usage

Some interesting discussion follows, debating the results and offering further suggestions on making the tests more useful. For example, Andrew Morton [interview] proposed including ext2 in the tests as a baseline, and Hans Reiser noted that reiser4 continues to improve rapidly. Read on for the full test results and much of the following discussion.