Sep 15 2011

I tend to be pretty eager about trying out new and faster filesystems, so when I got the opportunity to start using btrfs on my EEE I set it up as my main FS. Unfortunately, performance started to suffer — over time I began to see multi-second spikes in latency, massive I/O pressure for simple commands, and all kinds of system weirdness. Using Chrome slowly became unbearable and I avoided opening GMail whenever possible — opening GMail and Twitter simultaneously nuked the browser. I blamed Chrome and JS-heavy websites, but it turns out btrfs was to blame, as evidenced by this post. If you are runnint btrfs and are hitting these problems, upgrading to a 3.0 kernel and mounting with “autodefrag” should help — while still being tested, it helped on my system. If you’re thinking of switching, I’d recommend sticking with ext4 until performance stabilizes a bit.