Improving ZFS performance for large directories

[Kevin Day]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 7:29 PM, "Steven Hartland" <killing at multiplay.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Day" <toasty at dragondata.com>
> 
>> I think some of the issue is that nothing is being allowed to stay cached long. We have several parallel rsyncs running at once that are basically scanning every directory as fast as they can, combined with a bunch of rsync, http and ftp clients. I'm guessing with all that activity things are getting shoved out pretty quickly.
> 
> zfs send / recv a possible replacements for the rsyncs?

Unfortunately not. We're pulling these files from a host that we do not control, and isn't running ZFS. We're also serving these files up via a public rsync daemon, and the vast majority of the clients receiving files from it are not running ZFS either.

Total data size is about 125TB now, growing to ~300TB in the near future. It's just a ton of data that really isn't being stored in the best manner for this kind of system, but we don't control the layout.

-- Kevin