Improve VaM loading time by using WinBtrfs filesystem

[PermissionUsernameRequire]

Hey all,

Recently I took an interest in the WinBtrfs filesystem driver for Windows since I'm a big fan of using btrfs on all my Linux boxes.
I did this so I could utilise its snapshot and subvolume send/receive features in Windows.

My Windows PC has a separate nvme disk drive that I use to store all my games and VaM, which I reformatted with Btrfs.
My AddonPackages directory is 254GB big and contains close to 4700 var files. I feel using WinBtrfs improved the loading times of VaM.
This change is noticeable e.g. when loading a scene and the time to populate the AddonPackages directory when adding a plugin to a scene from it.

I figured I'd share this as it might be interesting for others to experiment with as well.

Please be aware that using a third-party filesystem could put all data stored in it at risk. A bug in the filesystem could corrupt your data, so make sure to maintain backups.
The WinBtrfs driver works for me and I've been using it for over a month, but it's unsupported by Microsoft and not nearly as battle-tested as the drivers that ship with Windows.

If you're a tech-savvy person and want to give this a shot despite the warning above, please make sure to share your experience in this thread

 

[atani]

Some comparison numbers would make it more interesting to give it a try, if you could provide them.

 

[PermissionUsernameRequire]

Some comparison numbers would make it more interesting to give it a try, if you could provide them.

Definitely, however I unfortunately did not do any benchmarks before the data migration as I did not anticipate difference in performance. It's a bit cumbersome to move all the data back and forth again, so I hope an interested fellow with some disk space to spare wants to do it.

 

[thfractal]

Some comparison numbers would make it more interesting to give it a try, if you could provide them.

Just google the thing you want to know, with its most basic label, and the simplest term that relates to the context of your problem, and dig through random forum posts until you find what your looking for. 95% of the time someone already asked the same question.


WinBtrfs and performance.. The first result was a feedback thread on the GitHub page where people are posting their performance differences before and after transferring over.

From my 2 minutes of speed reading, it looks like the performance a program like Vam that does a LOT of random reads and writes would see a pretty decent performance improvement, depending of course on your specific system.

Below is from the OP Post in the link if anyone doesn't wanna look for themselves (https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs/issues/65)

"
I couldn't find any benchmarks or any information about the performance of WinBtrfs, so I made a quick test with CrystalDiskMark 5. It seems that winbtrfs has better random writes/reads but lower seq. write/read performance.

Have you made similar observations?

OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 16299] (x64)
WinBtrfs v1.0.1 on HDD

WinBTRFS with LZO
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 119.619 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 93.616 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.381 MB/s [ 337.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.874 MB/s [ 457.5 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 117.870 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 122.909 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.672 MB/s [ 164.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 4.304 MB/s [ 1050.8 IOPS]

NTFS
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 152.757 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 145.346 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.951 MB/s [ 232.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.098 MB/s [ 268.1 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 154.369 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 146.380 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.395 MB/s [ 96.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.153 MB/s [ 281.5 IOPS]
"