anyone using ZFS for real?

[Craig Boston]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 12:27:49PM +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> on FreeBSD 7.0
> 
> i mean is it stable enough to be used on FreeBSD/amd64

It depends what you mean by "real".

I'm using it for everything (including root) on several systems:

	1 amd64 machine in a desktop role
	    * single SATA disk

	1 i386 machine in a server role (with only 512MB RAM)
	    * raidz over 3 ATA100 disks

	4 i386 machines in desktop roles
	    * two are single disk setups
	    * one is a 3 disk raidz (SATA)
	    * one is a 1GB compactflash card in a PCMCIA converter
	      (diskless laptop)

	1 bootable USB flash memory stick (i386 kernel) that I sometimes
	  plug in to random machines.  It's a 2GB stick and is configured
	  with lots of desktop stuff but is also handy for hardware tests
	  and recovering stuff off broken windows machines.  gzip
	  compression really shines here

I also have a couple of external USB hard drives that have a zpool on
them.  One of them is geli encrypted.  The other holds the src/obj/ports
filesystems for my flash-based systems, so it gets plugged in and zpool
import/export'd a lot when there are updates.

My recipe generally involves setting vm.kmem_size to somewhere between
1/3 and 1/2 of physical RAM size, and reducing kern.maxvnodes to
somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of its autotuned value.  I sometimes
disable prefetch, but honestly I can't tell a difference between it
being on or off.

Craig