Re: Does btrfs on Linux have a negative performance impact for PostgreSQL 13?

On 26/04/21, Marc Millas (marc(dot)millas(at)mokadb(dot)com) wrote:
> compression ?
>
> I am currently working on a project to move an oracle db to postgres.
> The db is 15 TB.
> with Oracle compression it does use 5 TB of disk space.
>
> If we cannot compress the whole thing, the project loses its economic base.
> (added 10 TB for prod, 10TB for pre-prod, 10TB for testing dev, ...)
>
> we do test zfs, and we will give a try to btrfs.

I've been using btrfs with lzo compression for several years on my
personal laptop and some non-critical backup systems with no trouble.
(In fact btrfs has helped us recover from some disk failures really
well.) While I run postgresql on my machine it is for light testing
purposes so I wouldn't want to comment on its suitability for
production.

There are some differences reported here between lzo and zlib
compression performance for Postgresql:
https://sudonull.com/post/96976-PostgreSQL-and-btrfs-elephant-on-an-oil-diet

zstd compression support for btrfs is reported on by Phoronix here:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=btrfs-zstd-compress&num=2

The compression page of the btrfs wiki is here:
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Compression

You might want to armor yourself for possible problems by reading the
Debian btrfs wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs

If you test your workload please let us know your results.

Rory