Veritas File System attempts to optimize the read and write access performance on both the Storage Checkpoint and the primary file system. Reads from a Storage Checkpoint typically perform at nearly the throughput of reads from a normal VxFS file system, allowing backups to proceed at the full speed of the VxFS file system.

Writes to the primary file system are typically affected by the Storage Checkpoints because the initial write to a data block requires a read of the old data, a write of the data to the Storage Checkpoint, and finally, the write of the new data to the primary file system. Having multiple Storage Checkpoints on the same file system, however, will not make writes slower. Only the initial write to a block suffers this penalty, allowing operations like writes to the intent log or inode updates to proceed at normal speed after the initial write.

The performance impact of Storage Checkpoints on a database is less when the database files are Direct I/O files. A performance degradation of less than 5% in throughput has been observed in a typical OLTP workload when the Storage Checkpoints only keep track of changed information. For Storage Checkpoints that are used for Storage Rollback, higher performance degradation (approximately 10 to 20 percent) has been observed in an OLTP workload. The degradation should be lower in most decision-support or data warehousing environments.

Reads from the Storage Checkpoint are impacted if the primary file system is busy, because the reads on the Storage Checkpoint are slowed by all of the disk I/O associated with the primary file system. Therefore, performing database backup when the database is less active is recommended.