[tuxen]

Interesting benchmarks...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...px=MTQ1OTE

http://www.solid-run.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1373

well,
the results may be interesting, but:

1. The first link goes to an article which did some "cherry picking" from the complete results provided here.
   There you'll see, that F2FS may be ways worse than EXT4.
   
2. The second linked document shows, that F2FS is faster when writing, but does provide (near) zero improvement for reads.
   In everyday life, reads account for >> 90% of "disk" accesses
   (and I'm pretty confident this is the case with XBMC as well).
   

So: no need to hurry implementing F2FS.


Mathias

Actually.. Speaking of the system itself, depending on the situation alot more writing occurs and not so much read to the sdcard, if you have a 512MB board and set your gpusplit to max 132MB or the normal 128MB the entire SYSTEM image ie. archlinux plus XBMC is run entirely from ram.

That leaves the plugins and the library functions. Many addons gather metadata and caches it in a database nowadays (plus all the art thumbs constantly created) this means the first time the addon bumps into a media file it needs to gather metadata for the item and write it to the "cache" database used for this. Read speeds are about the same so reading the metadata back is not really a bottleneck, so you might waste more time gathering metadata. And from this perspective and ofcause which addons used it actually means that it is slower overall. At least for me.

Its exactly the same when scanning media for the library(s) for example let me give you a rough example:
My library has around 500 movies and around 15 tv-shows they are located on a external self powered 3TB harddrive connected directly to the RPi.
Anyway, on a class 10 sdcard it took well over 2hours+ if not more to scan it, and I don't know how long to extract the movie info and make thumbs afterwards. Database file is only ~5MB.

Switching to a fast USB3 stick and the scan took around 20mins! About as fast as my PC. Consistantly.

Not only that, browsing my media afterwards the fanart and covers where now loaded instantly, literary as fast as I can move the "cursor" up and down, no more waiting 1/2 a sec to 1 or two.

I realize this has nothing to do with file systems, but it says a lot about where the bottleneck lies; the sdcard memory technology so anything that can speed this up without breaking any stability is more than welcome IMHO.

I am overclocked though at 1025/500/500/+4 and force_turbo=1 its been running like that for almost a year now and I never had any sdcard corruption problems I hear about now and then, setting anything higher just makes it crash or not boot. Funny thing is when I switched to USB storage I actually had to clock down 25Mhz because it was drawing more power, setting overvolt higher than +4 didn't help.

I have 2 RPi's, one from UK and one from China both 512MB (I had 256MB board also but donated it to a friend), oh and 2 cl10 sdcard's, and 1 cl6. All combos give same results and overclocking limits (settings) are the same, no.#1 runs runs latest official OE, no.#2 RPi runs raspbian btw. At the moment the XBMC RPi uses a 1.8" harddrive, raspbian a 32GB Kingston mini sdcard.

This is just sharing my experience thanks for reading if you did Hope some of it is useful.
Rgds tuxen