Jonathan Dowland wrote: > On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 12:07:32AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > > I absolutely agree, no matter what the file system, I would > > > definitely up the memory to the 16GB max, especially if this is to > > > be a media server. > > > > Most commercial "home NAS" boxes have much less than 16GB of RAM, for > > example (e.g. the `Asustor AS5304T` described by pcmag as "best for > > power users" for 2020 has 4GB of RAM). > > There's certainly a perception that, for using ZFS or BTRFS, >4GiB RAM > is required. I don't know whether that's actually true in practise. It's > one reason I avoid both those filesystems for machines I want to Just > Work. Part of the problem is one person's NAS is another person's media > server, with radically different requirements.
It's not a requirement. However, ZFS can and does use RAM as cache more aggressively than the kernel generally does, so more RAM is a performance improvement. -dsr-