Linux 5.0 I/O Scheduler Benchmarks On Laptop & Desktop Hardware

First up was looking at the startup time of xterm while sequential reads were happening in the background via FIO. BFQ in its low-latency mode yielded the shortest startup time... On the Ryzen 5 desktop, the other I/O scheduler configurations all performed the same while the Dell XPS laptop was the slowest when using mq-deadline and the second fastest result after BFQ low-latency was the default "none" configuration.

When again measuring the xterm startup time but mixing reads and writes, BFQ didn't perform nearly as good but both the low-latency mode and not yielded much slower startup times than the other test configurations.

When looking at the startup time for LibreOffice and GNOME Terminal with reads happening in the background, BFQ low-latency was the fastest. The Ryzen 5 desktop with Corsair NVMe SSD performed the same with the other I/O schedulers while the NVMe SSD in the Dell XPS 9370 fluctuated between the other scheduler options.

While BFQ low-latency yields the most responsive systems when launching programs with reads happening in the background, when mixing in background reads and writes is where it's still struggling. BFQ ended up being slower than the others while the low-latency mode was also failing to run in some configurations.

When looking at the random write performance with FIO, the desktop system with Corsair SSD saw the fastest performance using BFQ while on the Dell XPS 9370 the performance tied between BFQ and Mq-deadline.