Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.
Maybe this is wrong, but my understanding is BTRFS is generally slower than EXT4, and that’s okay. It’s not going for speed
Where it shines is not in its speed but in its versatility offering compression, rollback, subvol, etc
For example, for applications, you do a lot of writes/reads to Documents or load resources like for games, so use EXT4 for /home or for a dedicated /games partition
For your system, it could be broken via config tweaks or updates, so use BTRFS to have the rollback options
Also, it has self-healing RAID capabilities.
I’m still amazed from discovering filesystem-level compression.
cp --reflinkis really cool as well, even if it’s just something you expect from a CoW filesystem. Being able to near instantly duplicate a file or folder and work on its copy (with only the changes taking up space) is very useful.That’s great too!
It’s not that it’s slower than ext4 but that btrfs itself has gotten slower.