ZFS/compression/performance

[Dennis Glatting]

I would appreciate someone knowledgeable in ZFS point me in the right 
direction.

I have several ZFS arrays, some using gzip for compression. The compressed 
arrays hold very large text documents (10MB->20TB) and are highly 
compressible. Reading the files from a compressed data sets is fast with 
little load. However, writing to the compressed data sets incurs 
substantial load on the order of a load average from 12 to 20.

My questions are:

1) Why such a heavy load on writing?
2) What kind  of limiters can I put into effect to reduce load
    without impacting compressibilty? For example, is there some
    variable to controls the number of parallel compression
    operations?

I have a number of different systems. Memory is 24GB on each of the two 
large data systems, SSD (Revo) for cache, and a SATA II ZIL. One system is 
a 6 core i7 @ 3.33 GHz and the other 4 core ii7 @ 2.93 GHz. The arrays are 
RAIDz using cheap 2TB disks.

Thanks.