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At this time (August 2014); having been following the benchmarks for btrfs on Phoronix,(http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=home) and have been seeing on the aggregate; slower performance than ext4; why is this the case, and why would I ever want to consider installing with btrfs rather than ext4?

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    You have linked to the index page on Phoronix. Please link to the actual article. Did the article compare with compression enabled? If so, which compression algorithm? Is speed the only thing you are interested in? What about other btrfs features? Subvolumes and the ability to span physical partitions renders LVM and partitioning mostly obsolete. Snapshots and deduplication are also available, IIRC. The real question is, when will btrfs be stable enough for Ubuntu to shift to btrfs as the default filesystem. On Arch Linux, with lzo compression, I got faster boot times, but that's anecdotal.
    – muru
    Aug 4, 2014 at 6:24
  • On top of that, Phoronix tests are on SSD drives. Home OS installs are not (yet as of 2014-10) typically on SSD.
    – tomByrer
    Oct 6, 2014 at 13:26

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Btrfs was never intended to be faster than ext4. Its best side is features. And robustness. I think it is a very good idea to use Btrfs as root filesystem, but only if you use EFI. If booting the old way, you should better creater a separate /boot partition on EXT4.

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