>
> <big snip>
>
> However, if you have free memory that could be use to cache something,
> then why not use some/all/most of it? I certainly expect any operating
> system to try to use as much memory as possible and if it happens to use
> it as some sort of file system backing cache, good on it...
I agree totally.
There is a famous quote by Carl Sagan, if I can find it. I'll just
misquote it as best as I can here .. it goes like this :
In the scientific world we frequently see people presented with data that
refutes a position that they believe, previously and wwrongly, to be true.
Having viewed the data and the reserach behind it we often here the msay
"I was wrong and I now see how things really are. Thank you." We don't
see this in the world of politics or media at all. But in the scientific
community we must always review the data for our proof.
Thats a hack buts it the best I can do right now.
So what I am saying is that I was holding onto a belief, founded in the
days of the early 90's perhaps, which showed me that free memory allows a
system to respond quickly to memory pressure. Well if ZFS needs to take
ALL of my memory in order to ensure rapid performance and reliability then
so be it! If I need to do anything at all it seems clear that the machine
will just reallocate pages.
Then again .. I am still looking for data on that.
> The real question, though, is: does ZFS cause unexpected symptoms --
> such as system slowness, constant swapping -- because it uses too much
> memory?
Now I am not too sure about that and I want to put together a simple test
which simply malloc's memory like mad. Then time it on a system which has
no zpools. Then create the zpools and run the test again. This may be a
weak approach but I'm just thinking here.
>
> Kind of related: now that memory in the developed world [if one could
> call Australia, the 51st State of the Union developed], is requiring
> more than 128MB for a file system with ZFS' features excessive?
>
> I'd be inclined to say that it's not...
Heck, it is now 2007 and the required specs for Solaris 10 were written
when ? Back in 2005 or so ? Let's just put in 2GB of RAM and be happy.
Oh, we also need to stop using Sun Ultra 2 systems but
.. they won't bloody die !
Dennis
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