Billion-files File Systems (BfFS): A Comparison

As the volume of data being produced is increasing at an exponential rate that needs to be processed quickly, it is reasonable that the data needs to be available very close to the compute devices to reduce transfer latency. Due to this need, local filesystems are getting close attention to understand their inner workings, performance, and more importantly their limitations. This study analyzes few popular Linux filesystems: EXT4, XFS, BtrFS, ZFS, and F2FS by creating, storing, and then reading back one billion files from the local filesystem. The study also captured and analyzed read/write throughput, storage blocks usage, disk space utilization and overheads, and other metrics useful for system designers and integrators. Furthermore, the study explored other side effects such as filesystem performance degradation during and after these large numbers of files and folders are created.