An Empirical Study on the Interplay between Filesystems and SSD

This study presents a comprehensive empirical investigation on the interplay between actively-deployed file systems and an SSD. We test and analyze the performance of four widely used Linux file systems, which are ext2, ext3, XFS and Reiserfs, on an SSD with a range of different workloads. It is primarily intended to serve two purposes. One is that considering its widespread adoption trend, we are realistically motivated to have first-hand numbers of the actual performance of the emerging storage technology, especially in the contexts of daily deployment scenarios. The other goal is that we attempt to disclose the internal details behind the SSD's thin interface from a high-level perspective, totally different than those previous studies, which are typically micro-testonly. As a result of this study, we obtain several interesting and useful findings: (1) Generally, different file systems perform disparately on the SSD due to their various design principles, sometimes even with up to one order of magnitude of performance discrepancy. (2) File system format/mount options and workload characteristics have significant impacts on performance. (3) SSD would deliver optimal performance if used in a friendly manner. (4) Workloads, file systems and SSD interact in an intrinsically complicated way and in order to have optimal synergistic performance anticipation, users should seriously consider all of the three factors together, when setting up their SSD-based storage systems.