kern/138790: [zfs] ZFS ceases caching when mem demand is high

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 8:47 PM, <linimon at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Old Synopsis: ZFS ceases caching when mem demand is high
> New Synopsis: [zfs] ZFS ceases caching when mem demand is high
>
> Responsible-Changed-From-To: freebsd-bugs->freebsd-fs
> Responsible-Changed-By: linimon
> Responsible-Changed-When: Tue Sep 15 00:46:39 UTC 2009
> Responsible-Changed-Why:
> Over to maintainer(s).
>

I have a question on this:

Are we back to the old fight on dividing the system memory resource between
cache and paging again?  This seems like a major regression for using ZFS
over UFS.

The idea that this might be happening has caused me to regard my ZFS store
as a largely nfs/smb appliance.  Certainly it does well in this role --- and
dedicating a system to many terrabytes of store isn't the end-of-the-world,
but having used ZFS on my laptop --- and all the pain that incurs --- I'm
shy about using ZFS on anything that isn't essentially a disk appliance.
ZFS should be better than that.

If the cache/VM aren't integrated on FreeBSD, are they integrated in
OpenSolaris?