kern/138790: [zfs] ZFS ceases caching when mem demand is high

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Andrew Snow <andrew at modulus.org> wrote:

> Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
>
> ZFS should be better than that.
>>
>
> Why?  ZFS is designed for systems with large amounts of memory to spare - I
> don't think it should be used for any system with less than 2GB.
>
> Most brand new systems bought these days will have at least 2GB, if not 4
> or 8GB.
>

I don't see why that has to be the case.  ZFS is certainly _tuned_ for large
filesystems, but it's feature set has many more uses.  Pretty much the
entire world got the memo that unified buffercache was good.  As I
understand the stuff I've read, the fact that ZFS (in FreeBSD) isn't unified
is largely due to making it easier to import (sure... fine... but) ---
meaning that it's an item that should be fixed.  As I understand it, ZFS is
unified on OpenSolaris.


> UFS isn't going away, it is still the filesystem preferred for embedded and
> low-end systems.
>

What... snapshots are suddenly unhelpful on smaller systems?  I think not.