I have a home email/fileserver based on a Netra X1 with two 120Gb disks and 2Gb RAM which I updated to S10 6/06 so that I could ZFS for mirroring and snapshotting a data slice. Both disks are partitioned identically: slice 0 is 20Gb is root and mirrored (with SVM) and UFS, slice 1 is swap, slice 3 is 90Gb and is a ZFS mirrored pool, slice 7 is 50Mb for the SVM metadb.
So far I've seen [b]very[/b] high loads twice using ZFS which does not happen when the same task is implemented with UFS: 1. My email is served to clients by the Dovecot IMAP daemon. Mailboxes are stored in users home directories (there's only 5 mailboxes and there's rarely more than one accessed at a time). As soon as /home was moved to ZFS I noticed that as soon as the first imap client access started the load (as measured with uptime) shot up to around 15 and stays there! it's normally around 0.5. 2. I created a zone with the storage path in a new ZFS volume. Installing the zone took several hours and the load again was around 15. The first boot of this new zone took 16 hours to complete the svcadm initialisation during which time the load was between 12 and 15. I've just deleted the zone and ZFS volume and recreated if in UFS and it took 30 minutes to install (load peaked at 5) and 25 minutes to complete the first boot. I know it's a low spec machine but it's been fine running S10 with UFS. Obviously the checksumming in ZFS will add some CPU overhead (I'm not using any compression). Are there any known problems with ZFS causing high CPU loads?? Pete This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
