Best file system for a busy webserver

[Adam Vande More]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com>wrote:

> Does anyone have any opinions on which file system is best for a busy
> webserver (7 million hits/month)?  Is anyone one system noticeably better
> than any other?
>
> Just curious.  I'm getting ready to setup a new box running FreeBSD 9, and
> since I'm starting from scratch, I'm questioning all my previous
> assumptions.
>

Sounds like you have ample hardware, so I would probably consider ZFS.  You
get a lot of other options with it which simply aren't available or harder
to manage on a UFS system.  Things like data integrity, ZIL/ARC, live
low-cost snapshots, diff'ing the snapshot, transparent compression, etc all
come with ZFS.  Great tools for certain scenarios.  Properly setup, ZFS
RAID functionality will own any hardware raid solution ever presented
because ZFS doesn't rely on a battery for consistency, nor do they provide
most other features stated including integrity oriented ones.  ZFS is
intended to work with raw disk/JBOD. Good controllers are still important,
they simply don't have the knowledge to use them at peak efficiency.

I don't see much benefit to SSD's for this use case.  All the common files
should be in the fs cache which is at least an order of magnitude faster
than flash based memory, and finding enterprise SSD's(preferably SLC) which
obey FLUSH commands appropriately and have a capicitor appropriate to
production use is something more of a crapshoot than traditional SATA/SAS
drives.

All that being said, UFS is fine too.  I use it most often for light VM
installs and where resources are scarce.  However the 2 single biggest ZFS
feature I like are the data integrity and transparent compression are
wonderful which aren't available in UFS.  ZFS snapshots are much more
functional as well and go well w/ zfs send/receive.

-- 
Adam Vande More