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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems.

Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.

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I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.

For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.

[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm

Claude was super helpful at walking me through the APFS CLI tool to do some more advanced stuff that’s not in the GUI.

Is APFS that much slower than ZFS or btrfs (more comparable Linux file systems) or just ext4? Btrfs is noticeably slower than ext4, but at least all the Mac and Linux file systems are way faster than file operations on Windows :)

Here's a very recent video benchmarking APFS vs ZFS, btrfs, and XFS+: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wVNFaFDIn8

Just watched that after I got home from work. I was pleasantly surprised with how in-depth it was. Thanks for sharing it! It does seem like the worst issues he was seeing had to do with parallel IO performance, which is exacerbated by the agent development use case, so for sequential file creation/deletion, APFS is bad but not horrible.

It might not be the fastest, but at least it supports setting/keeping file creation time - unlike the clusterf*ck we still have on basically all Linux filesystems unfortunately

You're blaming the wrong thing.

It's the Linux kernel that deliberately does not provide user land a way to change file creation times.

Meanwhile XNU/macOS does.

I did also watch theos video on this and wonder if apple could be improving things for the agentic era.

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