FreeNAS vs OpenSolaris vs Nexenta ZFS Benchmarks

Martin Matuska mm at FreeBSD.org
Fri Sep 17 22:58:10 UTC 2010


>From the ZFS point of view,

we have v15 now in 8-STABLE but the most important part are the speed
improvements merged from recent ZFS (new metaslab code for significantly
faster writes, new ACL caching and stat() speedup).

pjd's recent very experimental patch enables ZFS v28 (the very latest).

Anyway, there will be always some speed penalty compared to OpenSolaris
(which is now dead and going to be continued in Openindiana and Illumos).

Another point is this test was done via iSCSI (initiator). The choice of
the used network card, its drivers and tuning of network parameters have
to be considered as well.

I have access to a Promise Storage Array with iSCSI and another one with
SAS with the same drives - and I must say iSCSI was slow in my tests
(SAS was really fast).

On 12. 9. 2010 23:40, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> 
> I'll respond and say that the current FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD 7, where ZFS 
> was an experimental filesystem.  I think a system based on FreeBSD 8 will 
> provide a better comparison.
> 
> I'm a tad confused about the whole "sharing a ZFS filesystem over iSCSI".  I 
> thought iSCSI was used to eport LUNs that you then put a filesystem on with a 
> client.
> 
> iSCSI on FreeBSD is fairly slow compared to other solutions, I think there is 
> some very preliminary work to fix that going on.
> 


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