Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:35:22 +0200
From:      "Daniel Eriksson" <daniel_k_eriksson@telia.com>
To:        <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Cc:        =?iso-8859-1?Q?Anders_H=E4ggstr=F6m?= <hagge.lists@intercorner.net>
Subject:   RE: FreeBSD + ZFS on a production server?
Message-ID:  <4F9C9299A10AE74E89EA580D14AA10A61A193E@royal64.emp.zapto.org>
In-Reply-To: <1a5a68400806080604ped08ce8p120fc21107e7de81@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <1a5a68400806080604ped08ce8p120fc21107e7de81@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Anders H=E4ggstr=F6m wrote:

> I plan to install a web server for production use and ZFS looks very
> interesting, especially since it has built-in support for RAID and
> checksum.

ZFS is very nice, but slightly over-hyped imho. However, some of the =
hype is warranted and for some use cases ZFS is a much better fit than =
UFS.

Despite what Wojciech Puchar says, ZFS checksumming can be very useful. =
I recently had two drives in a hardware RAID-5 array (8 x 1 TB on a =
Highpoint RocketRAID 2340) develop unreadable sectors seemingly at the =
same time. I'm not sure what caused it but the end result was a =
broken/unavailable array. To make a long story short I managed to get =
the drives to remap the bad sectors and bring the array back online. =
Since I had ZFS on the array I didn't have to wait for fsck to run =
(takes a very long time on a 7 TB array and requires a LOT of memory to =
even work), and after the pool had been scrubbed I had a list of files =
with bad checksums that I could restore from backup. With UFS I would =
have had silent data corruption.

Beware, there have been reports of mmap not working properly together =
with ZFS. I'm not sure if this is still a problem and if it would affect =
a typical web server. It does not seem to affect any of my fileservers =
(exporting NFS).

/Daniel Eriksson



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4F9C9299A10AE74E89EA580D14AA10A61A193E>