outer haven | 2012-05-20 09:51:02 +0000 
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btrfs fragmentation
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  Date: September 15, 2011  6:22am
Author: Mike Stipicevic
Labels: linux, filesystems
   URL: http://qrunk.com/view/btrfs-fragmentation.txt

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 [1]. 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.

[1] http://arosenfeld.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/back-to-ext4-from-btrfs/

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