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BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

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Mr. Lumbergh
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#41 Post by Mr. Lumbergh »

LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote:
Mr. Lumbergh wrote:Read what I wrote. I never did make that claim, just I'd rather not add the overhead if I don't have to.
So what is Your claim? - I just can't wait to see the final version ...
Can You define/measure that mysterious "overhead"?
What is the exact problem that You have with the BTRFS? (or any other FS?) , especially with a reference to a Debian stable? Please share Your experience, but please not to forget to include a real-time measurements of the dalays ... if You have any ...
I already told you, I looked at the differences and decided for myself that making the change wasn't worth the trouble for my particular use case. I'm not sure why you're taking that so personally.
If you're still curious about the slower write times (what I referred to as overhead), I'll refer you back to the benchmark.
And no, I don't have anything against the filesytem. It's just a tool, and one I already noted would facilitate backups quite well.

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pylkko
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migh be of interest...

#42 Post by pylkko »

Might be of interest to some here:

Btrfs Seeing Some Nice Performance Improvements For Linux 5.9
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... -Linux-5.9

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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#43 Post by Deb-fan »

^ Thanks, whatever this thread is, gotta admit its entertaining. :)

Yeah newer Kernel's clearly improved support in terms of btrfs or whatever else. I wuv Debian gnu/linux of course that includes stable too but on desktop majority of time am not running the stock kernel shipped with. Even on my beloved, crusty 10-11yr old laptop(w Buster n Stretch), thing has 5.4.x kernel set default. Would pretty much have to do the same (use newer kerns-etc)with Debian stable, even in a production environment.

Why kernel v. 5.4.x? For the hell of it of course, wanted to compile the thing and see how it'd run on this ancient hardware, runs fine and also wanted to see if i could get dkms to build the wl.ko module for the systems wireless, also success. Though point im trying to make here is btrfs performance on stock Debian stable vs appropriately modified Debian stable are surely vastly different things. Not that it/btrfs wouldnt be good enough on stock Debian. Blahblah n blah. :)
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#44 Post by bester69 »

Im using a 2008's CPU one simple core, a very old lowspec system with btrfs from years.. and the dropdown performance by having deployed several snapshots is very litle.... I think the filesystem performance the same with just one snapshot than having thousands snapshots... I didnt see any downfall by having more than one snapshot in same subvolume.,,

If Im not wrong Btrfs is core ext4 filesystem..

If Me with a lowspec desktop can use properly everyday a btrfs debian.. (I suppose my 2008 internal hdd disk must very slow in comparison with nowadays disk).. dont see what might be the problem for a very fast nowadays hdd internal disk and btrfs filesystem.

Btrfs in my opinion is best thing ever done for linux... since I installed (since debian Jessie) Ive not had to reinstall system neither got any headache, data loss scares or any bad day...

I alway do the same.. I install/uninstall a lot of things test them.. and when I need to consolide my installation, I rollback to my stables tested snapshot point, update packages and install new tested apps, to create a new snapshot consilidated point.. so this way I keep my system clean and very tested and stable.. just in case I always keep a previous snapshot point in case eventually I realised some thing I installed , made something didint work like before.

As I said, BTRFS, BEST THING EVER DONE for LINUX!!!, god bless whoever develop this filesystem :o


by the way, I ve made thousands of snapshots/rollbacks reboots.. and never got an issue with filesystem snapshots..it never got corrupted in restoring snapshots process, very easy to use and work with snapshots... Btrfs-Cleaner is quite fast, ultra stable very trustworthy even to work with partitions managers..
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#45 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Fedora have just announced they're moving to Btrfs as the default filesystem for v33:

https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-coming-to-fedora-33/
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#46 Post by bester69 »

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:Fedora have just announced they're moving to Btrfs as the default filesystem for v33:

https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-coming-to-fedora-33/
Great News to know BTRFS goes on fordward... there was a past time there were some doubts about btrfs future consolidation
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#47 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

I'd like to see an unbiased comparison of BTRFS RAID 1/10 vs mdadm RAID 1/10 - I've made the tests for myself, but nobody would believe me - too many fanboys ...
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Mr. Lumbergh
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#48 Post by Mr. Lumbergh »

LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote:I'd like to see an unbiased comparison of BTRFS RAID 1/10 vs mdadm RAID 1/10 - I've made the tests for myself, but nobody would believe me - too many fanboys ...
You noticed that too, eh? :D

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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#49 Post by Deb-fan »

How does btrfs do on things like SSD's with compression enabled ? Is there any notable speed gains during transfer, disk i/o operations ? Btrfs is certainly on the things I want to mess with list though. Don't always go with the version chasers in everything tech but yeppers, would be wanting latest-greatest in something like the btrfs filesystem. :)
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#50 Post by pylkko »

LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote: I've made the tests for myself, but nobody would believe me - too many fanboys ...
But if you produced such test results, what is the reason that you cannot publish them? Or have you? Because you cannot really expect people to believe otherwise. Or at least, it would draw much more interest towards the issue.
Deb-fan wrote:How does btrfs do on things like SSD's with compression enabled ? Is there any notable speed gains during transfer, disk i/o operations ? Btrfs is certainly on the things I want to mess with list though. Don't always go with the version chasers in everything tech but yeppers, would be wanting latest-greatest in something like the btrfs filesystem. :)
What do you mean exactly? Are you asking if the performance is better or worse than something else X? What do you want to compare to will decide if there is an already-existing benchmark out there on it. It is probably not possible to give a complete answer as it will depend on the hardware in question. When I install on btrfs I use compression and do it on an SSD. On the fly compression of course consumes compute time on the processor, but it will save space, and as discussed earlier, can increase throughput in cases where the compute operation is quicker than the transfer and what you are moving around compresses well.

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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#51 Post by Deb-fan »

^ Yeah was pretty much it, was wanting feedback from someone using btrfs on an SSD. Of course there's no easy answer I guess, like everything it must depend. A lot of really tech-literate people have spent considerable time working on btrfs so it's bound to be interesting stuff. :)
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#52 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

FWIW, acording to Phoronix btrfs is slower than xfs or f2fs on NVMe drives under kernel 5.8: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... tems&num=1

I've noticed that btrfs is *slightly* slower than xfs or f2fs on my M2 NVMe drive but it's not a big difference and anyway I use btrfs for the features (snapshots, subvolumes, automatic error-correction and the damage resistance conferred by the copy-on-write paradigm) rather than the performance.
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#53 Post by Deb-fan »

^ Thanks and that's about as recent as it gets 5.8, so is definitely appreciated and pointing out the full feature set too. Though this on-the-fly de/compression thing has had me fascinated for a long time. Along with the parallel/multicore tools like pigz etc. Btrfs is clearly something designed mostly for enterprise but still interesting stuff.
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#54 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

pylkko wrote:
LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote: I've made the tests for myself, but nobody would believe me - too many fanboys ...
But if you produced such test results, what is the reason that you cannot publish them? Or have you? Because you cannot really expect people to believe otherwise. Or at least, it would draw much more interest towards the issue.
Currently I can't repeat the tests, because that would require to reformat My drives - and I'm not going to do that just to to satisfy Your curiosity.
However I remember very well why I've decided to go with md arrays + ext4 and not with BTRFS. There were 2 main reasons:
1. All BTRFS Raid levels except level 1 are useless, in terms of performance (compared to md arrays: nearly 2 times slower)
2. Unlike md arrays, BTRFS increases access time instead of reducing it. F.e. on BTRFS Raid10 I've got ~13..14ms while on md Raid10 I have ~10ms (single disk: 12ms) - this is a show stopper, because it kills random access performance.

The test was performed on ridiculously cheap array of 4x WD RED RE4 500GB HDDs (single-platter 500GB HDDs are the most reliable HDDs on the market today). Programs used for testing: iozone, seeker.c and GNOME Disks.

---------------------
I'm not using SSDs to keep important data - the 2 SSDs I have installed in my PC are used only for virtual machines.
The md Raid10 array made of 4 HDDs is nearly as fast as a single SSD - but it does not suffer from write amplification, and it offers steady performance through the whole lifetime of the devices (unlike SSD). Besides, I can turn off the PC for a month, without risking of loosing 3% of random data - which is "acceptable" for SSDs, accordingly to JEDEC specifications. (that 3% is for TLC, and somehow they forgot to update the specs for QLC :lol: )
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#55 Post by Deb-fan »

^ Interesting insights, thanks for sharing. The this, that vs btrfs thing, just to be diplomatic about things, good news is nobody has to be wrong, we can all use any filesystem(s) we like, for any reason wanted and it's still all good. :)

Ps, besides everybody knows ntfs is the absolute best filesystem on earth. :P
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#56 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

Deb-fan wrote:Ps, besides everybody knows ntfs is the absolute best filesystem on earth. :P
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 15#p722183
:lol:
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#57 Post by Deb-fan »

^ LMAO ... though most of that went right over my head, you clearly know your stuff in tech fellow nixer. Am not intimately familiar with the workings of any filesystem. Just glad there's a lot better tech-literate people to develop them, so hopefully will get around to trying them all to some extent.
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#58 Post by pylkko »

LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote:
pylkko wrote:
LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote: I've made the tests for myself, but nobody would believe me - too many fanboys ...
But if you produced such test results, what is the reason that you cannot publish them? Or have you? Because you cannot really expect people to believe otherwise. Or at least, it would draw much more interest towards the issue.
Currently I can't repeat the tests, because that would require to reformat My drives - and I'm not going to do that just to to satisfy Your curiosity.
Then maybe don't complain that nobody will believe you. You do not need to repeat the tests, you only need to describe them so clearly that others could repeat or find somebody else that did and wasn't afraid to publish

some interesting links
benchmarks
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... 4-hdd-raid
guy simulates errors on drives with btrfs, zfs and other configs
http://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/batt ... grity.html

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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#59 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

That benchmark on Phoronix is worth crap, because Mr Larabel has no idea how to setup md Raid10 and how to configure Ext4 for use with the raid array.
man mkfs.ext4 wrote:stride=stride-size
Configure the filesystem for a RAID array with stride-size filesystem blocks. This is the number of blocks read or written to disk before moving to the next disk, which is sometimes referred to as the chunk size. This mostly affects placement of filesystem metadata like bitmaps at mke2fs time to avoid placing them on a single disk, which can hurt performance. It may also be used by the block allocator.

stripe_width=stripe-width
Configure the filesystem for a RAID array with stripe-width filesystem blocks per stripe. This is typically stride-size * N, where N is the number of data-bearing disks in the RAID (e.g. for RAID 5 there is one parity disk, so N will be the number of disks in the array minus 1). This allows the block allocator to prevent read-modify-write of the parity in a RAID stripe if possible when the data is written.
Besides, different stripe sizes are optimal for different workloads and for different device types - both md and ext4 allows to freely select the chunk size, and in btrfs there's no such option.
pylkko wrote:guy simulates errors on drives with btrfs, zfs and other configs
http://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/batt ... grity.html
This guy made many mistakes during testing - fortunately he have already noticed some of them .... ;)
But seriously, I'm using md arrays for over 15 years - they have survived hundreds of power outages and many disk failures - no single problem.
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Re: BTRFS on Debian Stable, your experiences?

#60 Post by pylkko »

LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote:That benchmark on Phoronix is worth crap, because Mr Larabel has no idea how to setup md Raid10 and how to configure Ext4 for use with the raid array.
Yes, if someone knew how to design a better, more fair and meanigful benchmark, people would not ignore it, for sure as crap! Right now, this is the best we have.
This guy made many mistakes during testing - fortunately he have already noticed some of them .... ;).
Yes, it is very well written. Especially that he admits his shortcomings and accepts criticism (as opposed to calling all other views flawed while not exposing his own) and even works with the posters to improve and redo stuff. This is really good stuff, and I haven't found any other similar post yet. It is unique in its kind.

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