Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS & XFS On Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 27 August 2026 at 11:13 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 73 Comments.

MariaDB benchmark with settings of Test: oltp_read_write, Threads: 1. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

MariaDB benchmark with settings of Test: oltp_write_only, Threads: 1. Linux 7.3 23 Aug: XFS was the fastest.

MariaDB benchmark with settings of Test: oltp_read_write, Threads: 32. Linux 7.2: EXT4 was the fastest.

MariaDB benchmark with settings of Test: oltp_write_only, Threads: 32. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

In the Btrfs article I reported on MariaDB seeing regressions with the CoW file-system on Linux 7.3. The other three file-systems didn't see much change with XFS overall performing the best for this database server.

PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 250, Mode: Read Write. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 250, Mode: Read Write, Average Latency. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 500, Mode: Read Write. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

PostgreSQL benchmark with settings of Scaling Factor: 100, Clients: 500, Mode: Read Write, Average Latency. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

With PostgreSQL 18 its performance appears to regress with Linux 7.3 on the XFS file-system.

Geometric Mean Of All Test Results benchmark with settings of Result Composite, Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 File-Systems. Linux 7.2: XFS was the fastest.

While Btrfs enjoyed some very nice performance gains with Linux 7.3, its overall performance typically trailed EXT4, F2FS, and XFS when testing at the defaults with copy-on-write, etc. The other file-systems tested didn't end up seeing much change out of the current state of Linux 7.3 when testing at the file-system defaults on this NVMe SSD backed workstation. More Linux 7.3 kernel benchmarking is ongoing at Phoronix.

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