Improving MetaData Performance of the Ext4 Journaling Device

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There is always a relentless pursuit of more performance from our storage systems. This includes more performance from hardware (faster disks, SSD’s), network (bigger pipes, larger MTU’s), operating systems (caching, IO schedulers), and file systems. There are many levers than can be moved to improve performance but this article will look at one particular piece - the file system journal device. In particular, the metadata performance of ext4 will be considered as the journal is moved to different devices.

Journaling for File Systems

Sometimes bad things such as power failures happen to systems. Power interruptions or failures can cause a file system to become corrupt very quickly because an IO operation is interrupted and not completed. Consequently, the file system has to be checked (fsck) which means the entire file system has to be checked (walked) to find and correct any problems. As file systems grew the amount of…

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