Traditional File Systems versus DualFS: A Performance Comparison Approach

DualFS is a next-generation journaling file system which has the same consistency guaranties as traditional journaling file systems but better performance. This paper introduces three new enhancements which significantly improve DualFS performance during normal operation, and presents different experimental results which compare DualFS and other traditional file systems, namely, Ext2, Ext3, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. The experiments carried out prove, for the first time, that a new file system design based on separation of data and metadata can significantly improve file systems’ performance without requiring several storage devices. key words: DualFS, data and meta-data separation, file systems’ comparison, storage devices, journaling.