https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

The best solution for small devices (under about 16 GB) is to reformat the FS with the --mixed option to mkfs.btrfs. This needs a kernel 2.6.37 or later, and similarly recent btrfs-progs.

$ mkfs.btrfs --mixed -f blk/btrfs
btrfs-progs v5.4.1
See <http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org> for more information.

Label:              (null)
UUID:               b648a523-f4cf-450a-b7a7-d4f020dfc3f0
Node size:          4096
Sector size:        4096
Filesystem size:    8.00GiB
Block group profiles:
  Data+Metadata:    single            8.00MiB
  System:           single            4.00MiB
SSD detected:       no
Incompat features:  mixed-bg, extref, skinny-metadata
Checksum:           crc32c
Number of devices:  1
Devices:
   ID        SIZE  PATH
    1     8.00GiB  blk/btrfs

-o compress=zstd

Test with about 190,0000 empty files (containing symlink):

attrs-test.tar.zst

tar xaf ~/attrs-test.tar.zst

Reiserfs needs 325M to store those data, tmpfs uses 5.6G to store all the metadata.

Default btrfs:

$ sudo btrfs fi df /mnt/sdb/rsync-huai/mountpoint/btrfs/
Data, single: total=8.00MiB, used=320.00KiB
System, DUP: total=8.00MiB, used=16.00KiB
Metadata, DUP: total=1.25GiB, used=976.80MiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=3.97MiB, used=0.00B

Mixed + zstd:

$ sudo btrfs fi df /mnt/sdb/rsync-huai/mountpoint/btrfs/
System, single: total=4.00MiB, used=4.00KiB
Data+Metadata, single: total=1.63GiB, used=1022.67MiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=15.36MiB, used=0.00B