A Comparison of Logging and Clustering

This paper compares the performance of the LFS and EFS storage managers in BSD UNIX. It expands on the measurements made in an earlier paper by Seltzer et al. [6], and also refl ects improvements made to the BSD implementation. Whereas EFS was generally faster than LFS in the Seltzer measurements, we found in our expanded benchmark set that the performance of LFS was generally equal to or better than that of EFS. We also found that EFS can potentially suffer from fragmentation of free space under actual use, which may limit the ability of the system to allocate large clusters. A Comparison of Logging and Clustering in File Systems January 31, 1994