Re: ZFS status now in June? / stable enough for a file server?

I've been running a 1.3TB zfs/raid-z on a core 2 duo for a while and I never
had to do any tuning the other i386 people have mentioned.  The only problem
I ran into was not being able to directly samba share out the zfs.  I got
around it by using a local nfs loopback and samba sharing the nfs mount
point.

Read speeds are acceptable for a media storage server, but the write speeds
are horrendous.  Trying to write via samba was about 1GB per hour.  On my
Windows box I installed Microsoft's Services For Unix and mounted the NFS
shares directly.  I ran into some interesting behaviour but I don't know if
I should blame Windows or FreeBSD.  I could only mount one NFS share per
reboot, and after a reboot the one I had mounted before would disconnect and
refuse to reconnect.  The only reason I can't say for certain it was a
Windows problem is FreeBSD started showing the TCP segment rejected errors
others have reported on this list.  Once I did get a successful mount if I
just tried directly copying to the idle server I would get around 1MB/s (yes
Byte, not bit) which was still too low for me.  Strangely, I found if I
created a looping script that did an ls every second on the zfs from an
account on the FreeBSD box itself my NFS write speeds would jump up to a
stable 8MB/s which was pretty respectable.  Strange behavior, but it worked.

So basically, I haven't lost any data with ZFS, and it seems very good for
local usage.  But I have run into some speed problems when trying to get it
to play nice with a Windows machine.

-- Brian Donnell

On 6/20/07, Olivier Mueller <om-lists-bsd_at_omx.ch> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have to setup a file storage server (non-critcal, just as secondary
> backup server) and I am wondering if would be a realistic idea to start
> using ZFS. I spent some time browsing the lists and newsgroups, and the
> status wiki page looks "good": http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS .
>
> The http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html page also states:
> June 2007       Start FreeBSD 7.0 Release Process, so this may also be
> a positive point about overall stability? :)
>
> It would be to store lots of data, and the FS-compression feature of ZFS
> would be quite interesting for this server.  Of course I'd be glad to
> help debugging any issues I may see.
>
> So if you are already using ZFS in "pre-production", I would be glad for
> a short "go/no go" feedback, thanks :-)
>
> regards,
> Olivier
>
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