Anselm Strauss wrote: > Hi, > > I'm interested in using ZFS on one of my small systems with 256 MB of > RAM and 4 GB flash disk. Since ZFS is now considered production ready on > FreeBSD I would like to use it as root filesystem and profit mainly from > the cool snapshot features for easy backups. > > I found multiple recommendations to run ZFS only on systems with enough > resources. But is this only a requirement if you want good performance > or also for ZFS to function properly at all?
I've found that on the i386 arch, that at minimum you need 756M of memory to do anything really useful. Now, I don't know if this has changed or not, but I doubt that the box would be useful for anything with only 256M. With that said, I can keep a box running at max disk r/w for hours on end with 2GB, and 1536M allocated/reserved for ZFS. Perhaps however that there have been enhancements introduced that I don't know about, that allow ZFS to operate in such a small memory address space, but for some reason I doubt it. If I'm wrong, someone will let us know ;) Steve
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