Re: ZFS performance

On 16 Feb 2024, at 02:08, joe mcguckin <joe@via.net> wrote:
> 
> I have a ZFS fileserver running samba- I ‘m using it as a file server and as a Timemachine backup server. TM work but mit is really slow.
> Are there speed tweaks for ZFS I can apply.  Does ZFS have perf monitoring features I can use to characterize the speed?

Apple's Time Machine is just horrendously slow in general, the host's
file system does not seem to matter at all. If you just copy a regular
file to that SMB share, you should see that it performs well enough.

I am still unsure what it is in Time machine that makes it so slow, but
it sometimes seems to stall completely on very small files, and it can
take minutes (!) to copy just a few kilobytes.

It may help a little to do on the Mac:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

but it won't get significantly faster. People should complain to Apple,
but they will probably just say that FreeBSD with Samba is not an
officially supported use case. :)

-Dimitry