FreeBSD + ZFS on a production server?

[Christian Walther]

2008/6/8 Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de>:
> "Anders Häggström" <hagge.lists at intercorner.net> wrote:
>
[...]
> Just in case you assume that ZFS on OpenSolaris 2008.05
> would be superior to ZFS on FreeBSD, this hasn't been my
> experience.
>
> On a system with an Athlon 1700+ and only 512 MB of RAM,
> receiving snapshots on OpenSolaris renders the GUI pretty
> much useless.
>
> On FreeBSD ZFS operations can cause delays as well, but it's
> significantly better than on OpenSolaris, even though FreeBSD's
> ZFS pool lies on a geli-encrypted gmirror while OpenSolaris uses
> the disk directly.
>
This hasn't anything to do with ZFS but on the different configuration
of the clockrate. FreeBSD uses 1000 ticks, while it's 500 on Solaris.
This means that FreeBSD can switch to different tasks twice as fast
than Solaris. For a server a high tick rate isn't necessary, so it
doesn't matter really. And Solaris still is a server OS.
If you're running a desktop it makes quite a difference, of course.
Interesstingly enough PC BSD configures kern.clockrate to 2000.