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

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 02:00:13PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Olivier Mueller wrote:
>  > 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? :)
> 
> As far as I know, 7-current is now in code freeze (though
> I haven't seen a "heads up" on this list yes).  That means
> that it is now becoming progressively stable.  Personally
> I think that it was quite stable even before it entered
> the freeze.
> 
>  > 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 :-)
> 
> My two cents:  It works very well in general.  I haven't
> seen any reports recently from people who actually lost
> any data due to ZFS problems.  (Certainly someone will
> correct me if I'm wrong.)
> 
> However, there are a few things that you should be aware
> of.  First:  The more RAM, the better.  Second, ZFS works
> much better on amd64 than on i386.  That's because of the
> larger address space and related vm management.  If you
> run ZFS on i386, you will need to spend some time on
> tuning it (maxvnodes sysctl etc., see the list archives),
> otherwise you might run into panics.  On amd64, ZFS seems
> to run fine out of the box without tuning.

No, you still need to tune it to avoid poor performance and deadlocks,
see the archives for my notes on this.

> Bottom line:  If you intend to set up ZFS with 7-current
> on an amd64 machine with a decent amount of RAM -- by all
> means, go ahead.

amd64 is definitely the way to go.

Kris