FS of choice for max random iops ( Maildir )

[freebsd at top-consulting.net]

Quoting Johan Hendriks <joh.hendriks at gmail.com>:

> freebsd at top-consulting.net schreef:
>> I have a new server that I would like to use as a back-end Maildir  
>> storage shared through NFS. The specs are:
>>
>> FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 2
>> Xeon x3470 @ 2.93 quad-core CPU
>> 4 GB Ram @ 1333mhz ( upgrading to 12GB tomorrow )
>> 3WARE 9650SE-16LP card with write cache enabled ( battery is installed )
>> 16 x WD RE3 1TB drives
>> RAID 10 setup
>>
>> Right now I defined an entire array of 8TB ( all 16 disks )  
>> separated in two pieces. 50 GB for FreeBSD to boot and the rest  
>> available to configure as storage.
>>
>> I've tried three options for the storage file system but I'm not  
>> sure which one is the best option since I can't really reproduce  
>> production conditions. I only ran tests with dd and bonnie and  
>> here's what I found:
>>
>> A. TEST1: dd bs=1024 if=/dev/zero of=/data/t1 count=1M
>>
>> 1. ZFS performed the worst, averaging 67MB/sec
>> 2. UFS + gjournal did around 130MB/sec
>> 3. UFS did around 190MB/sec
>>
>> B. TEST2 ( random file creation ): bonnie++ -d /data -c 10 -s 0 -n 50 -u 0
>>
>> 1. UFS + gjournal performed the worst
>> 2. ZFS performed somewhat better
>> 3. UFS performed the best again ( about 50% better )
>>
>> C. TEST3 ( sequential writing ): bonnie++ -d /data -c 10 -s 8088 -n 0 -u 0
>>
>> 1. UFS + gjournal crashed the box
>> 2. ZFS performed average
>> 3. UFS performed better than ZFS ( about 50% better )
>>
>>
>> I really like the concepts behind ZFS and UFS + Journaling but the  
>> performance hit is quite drastic when compared to UFS.
>>
>> What I'm looking for here is max IOPS when doing random  
>> read/writes. Is UFS the best choice for this ? Do my results make  
>> sense ?
>>
>>
>>
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> Did you use raidz1 2 or 3 or mirror for the ZFS ppol.
> I believe that ZFS mirror gives you the best performance, but the  
> least actual space.
>
> If you did make a raidz[1,2,3] try it with a mirror pool.
>
> Also do not use the raid function of your raid controller if you use  
> ZFS, this way you loose the goodies of zfs.
> If you setup ZFS use JBOD on the raid controller.
>
>
> Gr
> Johan
>
>

I simply did a : zpool create data da1  and no zfs-level raid. I also  
created a dataset - tried both with lzjb compression and without - but  
the results were similar, aka bad.

Is zfs supposed to be faster if you let it manage the disks directly ?