Higher priority to ZFS performance optimization

[DocSommer]

Hi there,

I wonder why the ZFS performance is quite low with nas4free. There are several topics about this including some (actually very good) hints how to tweak the config file and stuff like that. I find it odd that these things aren't included within the default installation since ZFS is listed as one of nas4free key features. Perhaps you guys might think about it.

[rostreich]

Most users don't know anything about ZFS. They see it as godpraised feature, want it, install it mostly on lowend hardware with small ram. then the whole system crashes because the lack of ram -> "nas4free is shit, it crashes blabla"

ZFS was built for LARGE enterprise filesystems, so you need much RAM and good hardware.

So the default ZFS config was modified to run with smallest given hardware possible. to not irritate users.

it's not just a filesystem, it has a lot of features and you need to think and learn about it, to use it. and then you can optimize the configuration, as every user has other usage profiles with data.

[DocSommer]

I know that ZFS is theoretically more some kind of a hardware demanding file system, but I also like it's featues. I run a RaidZ1 with 4 discs on a little HP Proliant N36L server with 4GB RAM - with Nexenta I could max out GBit LAN easily up to >80% (reading) and >60% (writing), never had any stability issues. So there is obviously no problem using ZFS with low end hardware since you don't need to expects >100clients accessing simultaneously. After changing to Nas4Free the performance decreased about more than 50%, there's quite some difference even with manually optimized config. Of course it's not that relevant in most daily home-NAS usage (streaming stuff) but it's a bit disappointing to see that either ZFS isn't fit well into FreeBSD or for some reason there is unused performance headroom.

Since the OS can read out the hardware specs (like RAM Size) it would be nice if the memory management would consider these values.