In the never-ending quest for more performance, we examine three different journaling device options for ext4 with an eye toward improving metadata performance. Who doesn’t like speed?

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.

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