The Good & Bad Of Btrfs In A Production World

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 26 April 2013 at 03:06 PM EDT. 13 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn't fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.

Anchor, an Australian web-hosting company, shared their findings after doing extensive research and testing of Btrfs. Overall, the Btrfs experience was "very positive" but they ran into regular issues with hung tasks during snapshotting, a bug causing CPU soft lock-ups, problems when filling up a Btrfs file-system, and some other shortcomings.

Positive findings include good use by staff on workstations and personal servers, Btrfs in conjunction with Ceph, zero data loss or corruption thus far, very good data integrity, and can be used for managing thousands of snapshots.

The hosting company decided to stick with EXT4 for now but they will continue monitoring ZFS and Btrfs. Their findings in full on Btrfs can be found on the Anchor blog.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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