2012-01-24 13:05, Mickaël CANÉVET wrote:
Hi,
Unless I misunderstood something, zfs send of a volume that has
compression activated, uncompress it. So if I do a zfs send|zfs receive
from a compressed volume to a compressed volume, my data are
uncompressed and compressed again. Right ?
Is there a more effective way to do it (without decompression and
recompression) ?
While I can not confirm or deny this statement, it was my
impression as well. Rationale being that the two systems
might demand different compression (i.e. "lzjb" or "none"
on the original system and "gzip-9" on the backup one).
Just like you probably have different VDEV layouts, etc.
Or perhaps even different encryption or dedup settings.
Compression, like many other components, lives on the
layer "under" logical storage (userdata blocks), and
gets applied to newly written blocks only (i.e. your
datasets can have a mix of different compression levels
for different files or even blocks within a file, if
you switched the methods during dataset lifetime).
Actually I would not be surprised if zfs-send userdata
stream is even above the block level (i.e. it would seem
normal to me if many small userdata blocks of original
pool might become one big block on the recipient).
So while some optimizations are possible, I think they
would violate layering quite much.
But, for example, it might make sense for zfs-send to
include the original compression algorithm information
into the sent stream and send the compressed data (less
network traffic or intermediate storage requirement,
to say the least - at zero price of recompression to
something perhaps more efficient), and if the recipient
dataset's algorithm differs - unpack and recompress it
on the receiving side.
If that's not done already :)
So far my over-the-net zfs sends are piped into gzip
or pigz, ssh and gunzip, and that often speeds up the
overall transfer. Probably can be done with less overhead
by "ssh -C" for implementations that have it.
//Jim
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