ZeroFS vs Azure Files Benchmarks

Performance comparison conducted on Azure Standard D8ads v6 (8 vCPUs, 32 GiB memory) in West Europe region.

Test Setup

• VM: Azure Standard D8ads v6, West Europe
• ZeroFS Storage: Azure Blob Storage (Hot tier)
• Azure Files Configuration: Hot tier, Standard performance
• Azure Files Mount: CIFS/SMB with cache=none (for fair comparison)
• Benchmark suite: github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/bench
• Operations per test: 10,000

Architecture Differences

ZeroFS: Direct Azure Blob Storage architecture. No additional infrastructure required. Full POSIX compliance via 9p protocol.

Azure Files: Managed SMB/CIFS service with NFS support.

Benchmark Results

Synthetic Benchmarks

Real-World Operations

Issues with Azure Files

Build Corruption

Azure Files demonstrated reliability issues during testing:

error: linking with `cc` failed: exit status: 1
  = note: /media/bench/ZeroFS/zerofs/target/debug/deps/serde_derive-44a05269d948f943.serde_derive.f1ce333ee4d08087-cgu.12.rcgu.o: 
          file not recognized: file format not recognized
          collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

The cargo build process failed on Azure Files due to corrupted build artifacts.

Cost Analysis

Storage Cost Comparison

Based on Azure pricing (West Europe region):

Azure Files Pricing:

• Storage: $0.0271/GB-Month (Hot tier)
• LRS redundancy included
• Additional transaction costs apply

Azure Blob Storage Pricing (for ZeroFS):

• Storage: $0.0196/GB-Month (Hot tier)
• LRS redundancy included
• Minimal transaction costs for object operations

Raw Storage Cost Comparison

Annual Storage Cost Projection

Important Notes:

• ZeroFS: Primary cost is Azure Blob storage at $0.0196/GB-month. Transaction costs are minimal.
• Azure Files: Storage cost is 1.4x higher at $0.0271/GB-month, plus additional transaction charges.
• Both solutions include LRS (Locally Redundant Storage) in the base price.

Key Observations

ZeroFS Advantages

• 34.9x faster for sequential writes
• 15.7x faster for data modifications
• 41.5x faster for empty file creation
• 38.9x faster for directory operations
• 4.2x faster for random reads
• 17.8x faster for archive extraction
• 8.3x faster for git clone operations
• 38% lower storage costs
• Reliable for build artifacts (cargo build successful)

Technical Details

Sequential Writes

Creates files in sequence. Tests metadata performance and write throughput.

ZeroFS: 10,000 files in 10.1 seconds
Azure Files: 10,000 files in 353.1 seconds (34.9x slower)

Data Modifications

Random writes to existing files. Tests consistency and caching.

ZeroFS: 10,000 operations in 9.4 seconds
Azure Files: 10,000 operations in 147.8 seconds (15.7x slower)

Single File Append

Appends to a single file. Tests lock contention and write ordering.

ZeroFS: 10,000 operations in 8.9 seconds
Azure Files: 10,000 operations in 148.6 seconds (16.6x slower)

Empty File Creation

Pure metadata operations without data writes.

ZeroFS: 10,000 files in 7.3 seconds
Azure Files: 10,000 files in 301.9 seconds (41.5x slower)

Empty Directory Creation

Tests directory metadata operations.

ZeroFS: 10,000 directories in 6.3 seconds
Azure Files: 10,000 directories in 243.4 seconds (38.9x slower)

Random Reads

Tests read performance from various file positions.

ZeroFS: 1,389.42 ops/sec
Azure Files: 327.18 ops/sec (4.2x slower)

Git Clone

Tests mixed read/write patterns with metadata operations.

ZeroFS: Completed in 2.2 seconds
Azure Files: Completed in 18.3 seconds (8.3x slower)

Compilation Workload

Rust compilation of ZeroFS codebase. Tests mixed read/write patterns and file consistency.

ZeroFS: 2 minutes 3 seconds (successful)
Azure Files: Failed - corrupted build artifacts

Archive Extraction

Extracting ZFS 2.3.3 source tarball. Tests sequential file creation with varying sizes.

ZeroFS: 9.1 seconds
Azure Files: 161.6 seconds (17.8x slower)

Summary

ZeroFS demonstrated significantly better performance compared to Azure Files in our benchmarks, with improvements ranging from 4.2x to 41.5x across different operations. The performance advantage is most pronounced in metadata operations where Azure Files shows latencies of 30-35ms compared to sub-millisecond latencies for ZeroFS.

In addition to the performance benefits, ZeroFS offers 38% lower storage costs using Azure Blob Storage. However, it's worth noting that Azure Files did encounter issues with the cargo build test in our specific configuration, which may require further investigation for development workloads.

For workloads requiring high-performance file operations, especially those with intensive metadata operations, ZeroFS presents a cost-effective alternative to Azure Files when using Azure cloud infrastructure.