RAM and zfs and multiple disks

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

At home I have a large ZFS server serving up 18x 2T disks (raidZ1 x2).  The
server machine is core2-duo with 8G RAM and an 'em' GigE added (because the
motherboard GigE was crap).  I use SATA port expanders to multiply the 6
motherboard ports.  The machine has a UFS boot and there is a bit of a
"fight" when something uses memory and/or UFS to do something.

I would have had ZFS on my desktop, but instead I use a diskless NFS setup
from the ZFS server.  Originally, when I setup these systems, the NFS
diskless desktop was avoiding the conflict between the nvidia driver being
32 bit only and ZFS liking more memory.  This is long moot, but the setup
remains.  The only remaining task here is to use NFSv4 diskless.  I'm not
sure how easy/hard that is.  The root mount seems to be NFSv3.

As for ZFS on desktops, all the PC-BSD setups I've done for the family are
ZFS.  They typically have either 2 or 4 gig of RAM.  I haven't really tried
a low memory ZFS (say 512 meg).  They seem to run acceptably well, but they
aren't really challenging anything --- running a FreeBSD/gnome or
FreeBSD/KDE desktop on a machine with 2 or 4 gig of RAM is really not a
challenge.