Does increasing the journal size improve performance for ext4 filesystems?

There is an article on linux-mag which says that increasing the size of the journal on ext4 filesystems actually improves filesystem performance for very large partitions.

I'm wondering if anyone here can authoritatively confirm or deny this for me.

I would just test it myself but I don't have any spare hard drives to reformat at the moment.

People have told me that this is true, and others have told me it isn't.

It does make a measure of sense to me, obviously a 5 TB partition is going to have a lot more metadata than a 500 GB partition, and yet the default journal size would be 128mb for both, so perhaps increasing the journal size for the larger partition might actually have an impact of some kind.

Obviously we are talking about a very small performance gain which would only be measured by the kind of strenuous system activity that a normal user would never experience, such as render farms or database servers, but still finding the answer to this question is important to me.

Solution 1:

Like you said. If the journal is bigger you have more possibilities with that filesystem but I don't really think that's the only way you're getting the better performance. You don't need a partition to try the new ext4 on a filesystem. You can create an image file with the dd command like so : Create a 1 GiB file containing only zeros (bs=blocksize, count=number of blocks):

dd if=/dev/zero of=file1G.tmp bs=1M count=1024

then you can create a ext4 filesystem in that file:

mkfs.ext4 /path/to/file1G.tmp