[CentOS] ZFS

Mon Sep 15 20:48:35 UTC 2014
Andrew Holway <andrew.holway at gmail.com>

>
>  Any comparison between ZFS and non-ZFS probably overlooks things like
> fully-checksummed data (not just metadata) and redundant copies.  ZFS will
> always be slower than filesystems without these features.  TANSTAAFL.


Not really true. It hugely depends on your workload. For example, if you
have a 20TB filesystem with 128GB of "ARC" (adaptive replacement cache)
then ZFS will be many many times faster then ext4 assuming that the "hot
data" is under 128GB as all reads will come from memory or a dedicated
cache SSD. If however you are streaming the whole 20TB from the filesystem
then the cache makes no difference and you just see the performance of the
disks. The checksumming for example does not typically add a performance
penalty as this calculation is done in parallel to normal disk operations.

The atomistic write mechanism of ZFS can be hundreds of times faster than
EXT in cases where your IO is random SYNC assuming you have a dedicated ZIL
(ZFS intent log) which keeps the journal. Read up on ZFS transaction groups
for more details.