On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:08:08 -0400, Eric Renfro wrote:

 ER> It surprises me how many people tout off ZFS, and don't really
understand just
 ER> what they're suggesting. My BBS runs on a VM running 512MB RAM, I
only upped it
 ER> recently to 1GB to run clamd. ZFS, adding compression to it, memory
utilization
 ER> just for ZFS skyrockets. Add deduplication on top of that, now we're talking
 ER> overkill memory. :)

ZFS memory utilization depends on a few things.  First of all, the
amount of disk space provisioned, how it is tuned, and the OS chosen.
It has never ran well under Linux, is known to have issues freeing
memory--I would never run it there.   For the space requirements of a
modern Fidonet system it is unlikely to be a problem.   A 100GB
virtual machine could provide more than enough in resources to
accommodate the most rigerous fidonet processing today.

If you're provisioning more space and are concerned about performance
degredation associated with caching a larger storage pool then you
probably don't need compression anyway.  My 100GB virtual machine has
several hundred thousand messages and the is only at 6% utilization. I
do not use any compression here nor see the need to in the future.

 ER> It would be less resource intensive to use message base compression
than to use
 ER> ZFS compression, in this logic, and I could, if I wanted to spend the time to
 ER> do so, prove that. When it comes to Linux, filesystems, and such, I know a
 ER> seriously heavy amount of information, as I've been doing Linux, hardcore,
 ER> since 1992. :)

Running ZFS on Linux is likely to provide a jaded opinion.  You should
run it on FreeBSD or Solaris.  The need for vast amounts of ram were
only needed in cases where a head node mounted terabytes of storage
and higher performance was desired.

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