On 02/19/13 05:47, MJ wrote: > Which app are you running that is generating millions of tiny files > in a single directory? Regardless, in this case OpenBSD is not the > right tool for the job. You need either FreeBSD or a Solaris variant > to handle this problem because you need ZFS. > > > What limits does ZFS have? --------------------------------------- > The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will > never be encountered in any practical operation. ZFS can store 16 > Exabytes in each storage pool, file system, file, or file attribute. > ZFS can store billions of names: files or directories in a directory, > file systems in a file system, or snapshots of a file system. ZFS can > store trillions of items: files in a file system, file systems, > volumes, or snapshots in a pool. > > > I'm not sure why ZFS hasn't yet been ported to OpenBSD, but if it > were then that would pretty much eliminate the need for my one and > only FreeBSD box ;-)
The usual stated reason is "license", it is completely unacceptable to OpenBSD. The other reason usually not given which I suspect would become obvious were the license not an instant non-starter is the nature of ZFS. As it is a major memory hog, it works well only on loaded 64 bit platforms. Since most of our 64 bit platforms are older, and Alpha and SGI machines with many gigabytes of memory are rare, you are probably talking an amd64 and maybe some sparc64 systems. Also...see the number of "ZFS Tuning Guides" out there. How...1980s. The OP here has a "special case" use, but virtually all ZFS uses involve knob twisting and experimentation, which is about as anti-OpenBSD as you can get. Granted, there are a lot of people who love knob-twisting, but that's not what OpenBSD is about. I use ZFS, and have a few ZFS systems in production, and what it does is pretty amazing, but mostly in the sense of the gigabytes of RAM it consumes for basic operation (and unexplained file system wedging). I've usually seen it used as a way to avoid good system design. Yes, huge file systems can be useful, but usually in papering over basic design flaws. Nick.
