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CaroCaronte

@marcan
ok but you're not doing (almost) any computation here, tar does not even compress anything, you're just barely reading and writing a set of files onto the hd so your point is ext4 is faster than apfs which might be true, apfs is not known for speed but reliability over ssd, encryption, snapshots support ecc...

I personally like both mac and linux (and use windows at work) so I'm happy either way
#crossPlatformHappiness

20 May 2023 at 8:45 | Wall-to-wall | Open on livellosegreto.it
3 comments
Hector Martin

@caronte Okay, tried btrfs which has all those same features: 2.7 seconds. And this was on a machine under load. Still more than twice as fast.

Linux's VFS subsystem is significantly faster than macOS', that's a fact and anyone who has managed large git trees on either OS (and Windows for that matter) will tell you how much smoother it is under Linux ;)

20 May 2023 at 8:53 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Hector Martin

@caronte Let's try some more VFS benchmarks. This time with a hot cache, so filesystem shouldn't matter much. Still btrfs on the Linux side:

ls -alR linux-6.3.3 > /dev/null
Linux: 0.26, macOS 1.00

Linux is 4 times faster at enumerating/stat()ing files.

time tar cf /dev/null linux-6.3.3
Linux 0.55, macOS 2.7

Linux is 5 times faster than macOS at reading a full Linux kernel tree from page cache.

Seriously, the difference is that huge. And I had to use a tmpfs on Linux instead of /dev/null since otherwise GNU tar is smart enough to optimize the actual data copy away.

@caronte Let's try some more VFS benchmarks. This time with a hot cache, so filesystem shouldn't matter much. Still btrfs on the Linux side:

ls -alR linux-6.3.3 > /dev/null
Linux: 0.26, macOS 1.00

Linux is 4 times faster at enumerating/stat()ing files.

time tar cf /dev/null linux-6.3.3
Linux 0.55, macOS 2.7

20 May 2023 at 8:59 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Janne Grunau

@caronte @marcan if apfs is made for reliability Apple seems to have failed at that. Evidence: the numerous users with silent file system corruption only discovered during resizing the apfs partition for an @AsahiLinux install

20 May 2023 at 9:08 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
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