Hi, I was wondering if anyone else has had problems with file vault
performance. I tested a Debian VM with and without the file vault and
performance was noticeably impacted by its use. Additionally, heavy file
vault I/O (copying lots of data or growing the vault) seems to tie up
one of the CPUs completely, although the top tool shows that the nvme fs
component is taking more of the CPU load than the file vault, which
surprised me... but that may just be an artifact of the parent/child
relationship.
For some specific numbers:
~47% load for init -> runtime -> nvme-1.3.fs
~14% load for init -> runtime -> file_vault -> file_vault -> tresor
~8% load for init -> runtime -> nvme
~7% load for init -> runtime -> nvme-1.part
All one one CPU, others were idle. This was while expanding file vault
capacity from 30 to 64 GB. The process took over half an hour to
complete (still running at time of this email).
This is on a newer machine that supports AES-NI and which has no problem
dealing with LUKS full disk encryption, so it surprised me to see these
results.