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Comment by josefbacik | Hacker News Reader

ZFS has a 7 year head start on BTRFS and has traditionally had about 5 times as many core contributors at any given time so I imagine they've solved this in some novel way by now.

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It's not just years it's the types of deployments. ZFS backs a very large number of very large critical systems.

Wasn't ZFS even "production ready" before BTRFS development even began?

I don't remember the state of it when it was first introduced into Solaris, maybe someones memory is better then mine. Was ZFS better of in 06-07 Then BTRFS is now?

btrfs development started in 2007 while ZFS development started in 2001. If you want to do a point in time comparison, look at how ZFS was in 2010. You can get the last copy of OpenSolaris for the comparison. It would need to be done on physical hardware due to poor support for virtualization back then.

By the way, ZFS was deemed production ready after 4 years of development.

That's true. One quick side note though: BTRFS actually had a fairly long "draft period" (multiple years) of design. I have no clue how long that was on ZFS. I just know that the original author mentioned that somewhere.

If you have time, you can watch this video where Jeff Bonwick describes the birth of ZFS:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dcV2PaMTAJ4

I am the guy who asked the LZJB question. To summarize my recollection, formal design work on ZFS started in 2001 when Matthew Ahrens started working at Sun. Jeff Bonwick had promised Matthew Ahrens a job at Sun making a filesystem a 6 months to a year before then when Matt was still in college. I am sure that both Jeff and Matt had some thoughts on it during that time, but there was no formal effort until Matt's employment started.

The idea that btrfs has fewer contributors ought to be a surprise for many. Users tend to assume the opposite. ZFS having 5x more seems to be on the high side to me though. How did you determine that?

By the way, I was under the impression that ZFS development started in 2001 while btrfs development started in 2007. That would be a 6 year difference.

5x more core ZFS contributors sounds to me worse and not better than BTRFS. The more the worse usually.

Not sure how that tracks. These file systems are huge code bases with lots of problems and areas for improvement. When you only have 2-4 people who understand most of it at a given time things move slowly. If I could tell somebody to go fix balance my life would be a whole lot easier, but in reality we end up being interrupt driven and have to prioritize differently.

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