Comments on: zfs un-benchmarking

By: Randy Bias

Randy Bias — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:06:22 +0000

You didn’t provide configuration information. How is your pool configured?

By: thinking sysadmin » Blog Archive » Catch-up Links, 7/9/2008

thinking sysadmin » Blog Archive » Catch-up Links, 7/9/2008 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:47:17 +0000

[...] zfs un-benchmarking – “Our rationale for testing was to finally get some numbers that we can provide to users/customers about real zfs performance. There is a huge amount of (largely uncontested) information (emanating mainly from Sun and its agents) that zfs is a very fast file system. We want to test this, on real, live hardware, and report. Well, we can???t do the latter due to Sun???s licensing, but we did do the former. Paraphrasing Mark Twain: ‘Rumors of zfs???s performance have been greatly exaggerated.’” When Joe Landman blogs about performance, I take what he has to say seriously, but given the stability problems he notes, I wonder if – as he suggests – that driver issues are a factor here, and we’re not seeing a generic ZFS issue. (Seen at InsideHPC.) [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:41:16 +0000

@Mark

Thanks. This mirrors what I have heard. I am now pulling the two zip files (why not a nice simple single dvd pull or torrent?).

I have an older Nevada build (pulled when it was originally announced). Will try this one soon.

By: Mark J Musante

Mark J Musante — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:32:40 +0000

Here’s an online thing to hear: The zfs in OpenSolaris is more recent than the version in Solaris 10, so if you’re interested in testing the latest stuff, with all the performance enhancements that have been checked into the code tree, you’ll want OpenSolaris. Better yet, grab a recent “Nevada” build which has even closed-source drivers built into it. The latest released build of Nevada is build 91 and available here:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd/

By: Witek

Witek — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:08:22 +0000

@Joe. I also like zfs for easy of usage, snapshots and checksuming. I don’t pay big attention to performance, but it is very important in real aplications.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:28:08 +0000

@Witek

So what I have been hearing (mostly offline) has been that the zfs in OpenSolaris is *superior* (or more recent/more patched/better performing) than the one in the official Sun product. I have also heard some … well … unflattering FreeBSD zfs implementation comments.

We are going to be building a new demo unit late this month, and will include OpenSolaris on our testing regime. I’ll see if we can get FreeBSD going as well. Windows 2008 runs beautifully on this box, as does Linux. Performance is amazing on those two.

We want to use zfs for its ecc-like features. Its not a perfect file system, not completely resistant to corruption, but it has good features to make it resilient in the face of errors. This I like. This we want to use and exploit.