Filesystem metadata overhead

Which filesystems have the largest metadata overhead[1]? We can find out using guestfish sparse file support and a short shell script:

#!/bin/sh -

guestfish=fish/guestfish
testimg=/mnt/tmp/test/test.img
size=1G

for fstype in ext2 ext3 ext4 xfs ntfs msdos ; do
    $guestfish <<EOF
      sparse $testimg $size
      run
      sfdiskM /dev/sda ,
      mkfs $fstype /dev/sda1
EOF
    echo -n "$fstype: "
    du $testimg
done

The results:

Filesystem	Allocated kilobytes (out of 1G)	Overhead %
ext2	16948	1.6%
ext3 [2]	33352	3.2%
ext4 [2]	33288	3.2%
xfs	5132	0.5%
ntfs [3]	5748	0.5%
msdos & vfat	2076	0.2%
reiserfs [3]	32916	3.1%
btrfs [3]	4224	0.4%
hfs & hfsplus [3]	16432	1.6%
nilfs2 [3]	2060	0.2%
jfs [3]	4364	0.4%
gfs [3]	16612	1.6%
gfs2 [3,4]	132576	12%

Notes

[1] Yes, there are shortcomings in the methodology. What this really measures is how many blocks are written by the mkfs program. Even if you believe the figures, this only measures the initial overhead, but you can use the same technique to measure the overhead of storing (eg) lots of small files, or whatever is appropriate for your workload.
[2] Note the difference between ext2 and ext3/4 seems to be entirely down to the size of the journal, which is a kind of metadata overhead, but one that you can easily control.
[3] Needs three small patches to libguestfs to get these filesystems to work.
[4] This seems off the scale — needs further investigation.

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