PostgreSQL benchmarks:

Another popular, open source database server is PostgreSQL. Which filesystem is the fastest here?

The first test is about creating and populating a PostgreSQL database with 100 thousand rows, using sysbench oltp prepare test:

Sysbench postgresql prepare time

We have a great EXT4 victory here, with a prepare time way lower then the XFS one.

Now, let's start to query the db with the simple, read-only sysbench oltp benchmark:

Sysbench postgresql simple test

In this read-only test, XFS is no slower than EXT4.

What happen in the complex, read-write, transactional benchmark?

Sysbench postgresql complex test

EXT4 is again much faster then XFS.

From these tests it seems that when dealing with writes, EXT4 is faster then XFS in PostgreSQL's workload type.

Finally, I run the pgbench benchmark, with scale and requests per client both set to 1000. First, the prepare time:

PgBench prepare time

This time, XFS shows the same performance then EXT4.

Now, the real benchmark run:

PgBench performance

EXT4 is again over 2X faster then XFS.

So, in the end, if you plan to use PostgreSQL, go with EXT4 filesystem (especially if you plan to execute a large number of INSERT / UPDATE / TRANSACTION statements).