ZFS melting under postgres...

[matt at layeredtech.com]

> Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> writes:
>> These are all "normal" CompactFlash cards, for which the widely
>> available size seems to be 16 GB max, right?
>
> So?  That's more than enough for a ZFS intent log (as a rule of thumb,
> the ZIL should be half the size of the server's RAM).
>
>> Did you (or anyone) deploy CF drives for production servers?
>
> My router (and DNS, NTP and DHCP server) is a net4801 with a 1 GB CF
> chip.
>
> DES

Some folks are fond of having a fast boot disk with practically no latency
and no moving parts.

I run quite a few production servers on CF drives in a very large (12k+
servers) data center environment. In nearly every case, the CF card is the
systems root (/) partition and is always mounted read-only.

In some cases where we use CF, the systems also have a SAS/SATA disk for
maintenance. When needed, we can spin up the SAS/SATA disk. On that hard
drive, we keep a history of the CF card images and other maintenance items
like /usr/ports and /usr/src.

We use ATA CF adapters that I buy off eBay for $1.98 each. They ship
direct from Hong Kong and work great.