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I like ZFS best. But it requires Solaris portability layer for linux, which isn't great, and since it's not just built into linux it's easy to get into a state where ZFS isn't working.

So I moved to btrfs. Btrfs gives me LONG delay problems, sometimes more than a minute (!) before my editor will let me type again unless I'm on an SSD. So I moved my active files to an SSD. Still, I can't believe btrfs is still such shit after this many years, compared to ZFS which was really good early on even.

I've even considered leaving linux for Open Indiana. The file system is almost that important to me.

once_aphysicist 10mo ago

How do you know it's btrfs causing the slowdown? I've been using it as my primary filesystem for years (basically since it became default on Fedora), never noticed a slowdown.

I've had other issues though, it's incredibly complex to recover when faults happen. Also, not having a feature complete fsck after all these years is bonkers!

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Mike Dilger ☑️ 10mo ago

They were kernel btrfs processes that were busy. I also got dmesg errors that were basically timeouts. I spent a lot of time with the disks thinking they were failing, but no they weren't. Also the mounts were taking so long that systemd was giving up. But after some research I upgraded to btrfs space cache v2 and that problem went away. I also spent time defragmenting and balancing and reading as much as I could on how to speed up btrfs. But eventually I just moved to SSD where it didn't really matter.

I don't know if you ever tried ZFS but I used it a lot for about a decade and it never gave me any problems (except as I mention the kernel upgrades breaking it). And I love raidz which btrfs doesn't do.