FreeBSD + ZFS on a production server?

[Dick Hoogendijk]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2008 23:31:35 +0200 (CEST)
Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:

> UFS use what's unused. works on 16MB and 16GB.

It's difficult to tell about consumed memory in ZFS vs UFS since UFS
can be quite agressive at caching as well. -(although this caching is
often hidden by system tools and reported as "unused" memory)-

> > project anyway. The live-cd hangs on "device detect".
> > One of the pros for OpenSolaris I've noticed is the support for a
> > virtual host
> 
> man jail

Jails are just slightly comparable to solaris zones. It's much more
then resource control! They're really like independent machines with
almost no memory footprint. It's quite common to run different zones
for a mailserver, webserver and i.e. users. Sparse zones use little
space, because lots of code is shared. It's all very tunable.
Running 40 sparse zones is hardly noticable.
Try that with 40 jails;-)

> > I have now found a filesystem for linux that do checksum on the fly,
> > btrfs.
> 
> but why you need it?! all PATA/SATA drives do checksumming on every
> read. in hardware, no CPU load.

Because the ZFS checksumming makes the FS selfhealing. Chance for
errors are almost nill. No fsck.
Yes, it consumes memory, but memory is cheap, very cheap!
CPU load is hardly noticable.

-- 
Dick Hoogendijk -- PGP/GnuPG key: 01D2433D
++ http://nagual.nl/ + SunOS sxde 01/08 ++