Re: ZFS performance weirdness on a a Netra X1

On 2006-08-17 21:54:11 +0100, "Daniel Rock" <v200633@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

That way ZFS cannot enable the write cache on the disks. But these
are IDE disks and on non-Sun IDE disks the write cache is normally enabled
by default. So this type of setup should cause the performance
degradation.

Yes, they are non Sun disks as you guessed. I think you mean `should not' not `should'?

How did you set up the individual zfs filesystems? Did you change the
checksum algorithm to sha256? This will kill performance - especially on
such a slow machine. What is the output of "zfs get all export/zones/ts"
(or the other names)?

I just did zfs create export/... with no special options.

For export/zones/tank:
# zfs get all export/zones/ts
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
export/zones/ts type filesystem -
export/zones/ts creation Tue Aug 8 21:42 2006 -
export/zones/ts used 24.5K -
export/zones/ts available 91.7G -
export/zones/ts referenced 24.5K -
export/zones/ts compressratio 1.00x -
export/zones/ts mounted yes -
export/zones/ts quota none default
export/zones/ts reservation none default
export/zones/ts recordsize 128K default
export/zones/ts mountpoint /export/zones/ts default
export/zones/ts sharenfs off default
export/zones/ts checksum on default
export/zones/ts compression off default
export/zones/ts atime on default
export/zones/ts devices on default
export/zones/ts exec on default
export/zones/ts setuid on default
export/zones/ts readonly off default
export/zones/ts zoned off default
export/zones/ts snapdir hidden default
export/zones/ts aclmode groupmask default
export/zones/ts aclinherit secure default

(I've deleted the zone, hence space is different now).

It's really annoying because we were planning to buy a couple more used X1s as service machines (they're small, cheap, cheap to run, and SPARC which matters to us), but performance like this is crippling. My experiences with zfs on other machines have been fine.

--tim

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