According to a Sun document called something like 'ZFS best practice' I
read some time ago, best practice was to use the entire disk for ZFS and
not to partition or slice it in any way. Does this advice hold good for
FreeBSD as well?
I looked at a server earlier this week that was running FreeBSD 8.0 and
had 2 x 1 Tb SAS disks in a ZFS 13 mirror with a third identical disk as a
spare. Large file I/O throughput was OK but the mail jail it hosted had
periods when it was very slow with accessing lots of small files. All
three disks (the two in the ZFS mirror plus the spare) had been
partitioned with gpart so that partition 1 was a 6 GB swap and partition 2
filled the rest of the disk and had a 'freebsd-zfs' partition on it. It
was these second partitions that were part of the mirror.
This doesn't sound like a very good idea to me as surelt disk seeks for
swap and for ZFS file I/O are bound to clash. aren't they?
Another point about the Sun ZFS paper - it mentioned optimum performance
would be obtained with RAIDz pools if the number of disks was between 3
and 9. So I've always limited my pools to a maximum of 9 active disks plus
spares but the other day someone here was talking of seeing hundreds of
disks in a single pool! So what is the current advice for ZFS in Solaris
and FreeBSD?
Andy
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
