Bad ZFS performance on the desktop

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2020 07:19:18 +0000
Erik Lauritsen <eriklauritsen at yandex.com> wrote:

> I have monitored ZFS using 'top' and can see that it never eats
> more than half of my memory, so it's not because I'm out of
> memory.

	Is there any sign of swap activity ? This sounds a lot like swap
thrashing.
 
> I'm thinking about getting a couple of SSDs, but then again I use
> backup meticulously and perhaps ZFS on a single drive or just UFS
> is better for the desktop?

	I'm using ZFS on a single SSD for boot (with everything important
mounted from a NAS running a bunch of mirrors), it's fast but I did have to
set vfs.zfs.arc_max in /boot/loader.conf (to 2GB on my 8GB machine) in
order to stop browsers thrashing swap.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org>