Re: Defaults in 10.0 ZFS through bsdinstall

From: Mark Felder <feld_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 09:36:31 -0600
On Fri, Nov 15, 2013, at 3:23, Stefan Esser wrote:
> Am 14.11.2013 22:02, schrieb Teske, Devin:
> > On Nov 14, 2013, at 12:49 PM, Mark Felder wrote:
> >> We don't even do installs on UFS with atime disabled by default in fstab
> >> so why should we so suddenly change course for ZFS?
> >>
> > 
> > You've made a good point.
> 
> There is major difference between UFS and ZFS: UFS allows in-place
> updates of i-node fields (like atime), while ZFS uses COW for all
> data, file contents and meta-data like the i-nodes.
> 
> With atime ON on UFS you'll see a small number of writes on
> file-systems that are only read - we are used to accept that.
> 
> On ZFS every update of atime causes a write of the meta-data to
> a free location on disk, then updates of all data structures
> that reference that meta-data up to the root of the tree (the
> uberblock). An update of a few bytes turns out to write tens
> of KB for each atime update (within the TXG sync interval, which
> defaults to 5 seconds on FreeBSD). If you create snapshots, then
> each snapshot will contain a copy of the metadata that was valid
> at the time of the snapshot (well, that's not so different from
> the situation with UFS snapshots, just that the data structures
> are much more complex and larger in the ZFS case). Due to the
> ease and speed of snapshot creation with ZFS there probably are
> a magnitude or more snapshots on a typical ZFS system than on
> one using UFS (I currently have a few hundred and have turned off
> periodic snapshot generation on many unimportant file-systems,
> already).
> 
> I really hope that we get relatime (with minor variations that
> were discussed a few months ago) and that we make it the default
> in some future release ...
> 

Thanks for this in-depth explanation. I wasn't aware that atime was
quite so expensive on ZFS.
Received on Fri Nov 15 2013 - 14:36:34 UTC

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