> I'v had the misfortune of using btrfs in production with a few hundred machines on Ubuntu 14.04
You are not alone. btrfs seems to be kind of stable - as in does not corrupt itself anymore - with 4.2 but it's been a nasty ride.
It's an experimental filesystem that is neither complete nor stable yet. I wish this would be better communicated.
It's needless frustrating: If you search for btrfs you come across a few slide decks that tell you: It's fine you can use it... after the first strange problems you'll subscribe the mailing list and every other day there is some post that shines some light into strange behavior and stuff that is not implemented.
If you want checksumming on your single hdd backup disk btrfs is fine. For everything else you are up to some surprises... basically everything volume management and RAID is pretty much experimental and has strange behavior.
Performance is not even a topic. I remember the ML discussion on this OLTP blogpost and the majority of responses was: Don't run databases on btrfs you stupid! I'd rather would read a technical discussion about the problems but from reading the ML it seems like it's too complex and few understand the complexity.
@bcantrill called it a shit-show in some podcast and while it maybe technically not true it sure does looks like that.
If you want peace of mind use mdraid+ext4 (or xfs) - ZFS on Linux has a lot of problems for heavy usage but the community is IMHO more invested in making it a good Linux citizen.
On the other hand: This stuff is complicated and everyone expects miracles. I'm just looking at it from sysadmin perspective and on Linux both suck at the moment. But ZFS won't eat your data and has far better tooling.
If you need something that works for high load on Linux I'd use neither.
You are not alone. btrfs seems to be kind of stable - as in does not corrupt itself anymore - with 4.2 but it's been a nasty ride.
It's an experimental filesystem that is neither complete nor stable yet. I wish this would be better communicated.
It's needless frustrating: If you search for btrfs you come across a few slide decks that tell you: It's fine you can use it... after the first strange problems you'll subscribe the mailing list and every other day there is some post that shines some light into strange behavior and stuff that is not implemented.
If you want checksumming on your single hdd backup disk btrfs is fine. For everything else you are up to some surprises... basically everything volume management and RAID is pretty much experimental and has strange behavior.
Performance is not even a topic. I remember the ML discussion on this OLTP blogpost and the majority of responses was: Don't run databases on btrfs you stupid! I'd rather would read a technical discussion about the problems but from reading the ML it seems like it's too complex and few understand the complexity.
@bcantrill called it a shit-show in some podcast and while it maybe technically not true it sure does looks like that.
If you want peace of mind use mdraid+ext4 (or xfs) - ZFS on Linux has a lot of problems for heavy usage but the community is IMHO more invested in making it a good Linux citizen.
On the other hand: This stuff is complicated and everyone expects miracles. I'm just looking at it from sysadmin perspective and on Linux both suck at the moment. But ZFS won't eat your data and has far better tooling.
If you need something that works for high load on Linux I'd use neither.