ZFS performance on 7.2-release/amd64 low compared to UFS2 + SoftUpdates

[Simun Mikecin]

Dan Naumov wrote:

> All the ZFS tuning guides for FreeBSD (including one on the FreeBSD
> ZFS wiki) have recommended values between 64M and 128M to improve
> stability, so that what I went with. How much of my max kmem is it
> safe to give to ZFS?


On amd64 since 7.2-RELEASE manually adjusting kmem map or arc size is not necessary any more (see /usr/src/UPDATING) for stability. But if you like you can still do it.
If you want to use ZFS allot I suggest to use latest 7-STABLE (which has ZFS v13, more stable, more bugs resolved). amd64 of course. For i386 it would be better to use UFS+SU (for SCSI) or UFS+gjournal (for ATA).

btw. turning on compression on ZFS filesystems might actually increase it's performance that is seen by benchmark programs.