el-John-o
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2013
- Messages
- 15
Hey all,
So I went through the FreeNAS manual and reconfigured my Ubuntu server box to run FreeNAS. Now I read the vague '8GB is typically the minimum' and 'below 4GB prefetching is disabled' parts, so I figured my 2GB system is in the clear with reduced performance and features. No biggie.
But then I came on the forums and found out that, running ZFS with less than 8GB of RAM is completely ill advised regardless?
I have a single Xeon 2.8GHz (single core, dual socket but only one CPU in) server with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, running (currently) a 1TB mirrored ZFS pool. It's all SATA 1.5Gb/s.
I'm getting 110-115MByte/s read speeds and close to 50MByte/s write speeds. So performance is, basically, saturating gigabit. So the other issue I read, is that when transferring large files, you can get errors or kernel panics. Well, I 'backed up' my RAID before setting up FreeNAS, and copied back some 300GB of data, with lots and lots of 2, 3, 4 even 7 or 8GB single files. It ran at a constant throughput speed of about 58MByte/s, and never had any issues.
So I guess my question is.. what's the issue? I look at a machine that runs quite well, should I expect problems in the future or something? DDR2 is pricey, so I'm not going to upgrade this machine. I plan on building something new in the future, so spending any money on this box just doesn't make sense. I guess I could back everything up and rebuilt the pool as a UFS setup, but I'm failing to see why? I don't have any issues.
I have FreeNAS configured pretty much vanilla, and I'm running a CIFS share to my Windows box, and an NFS share to my linux and Mac boxes. The NFS share is the fastest, the CIFS share is a bit slower but still quick..
So I went through the FreeNAS manual and reconfigured my Ubuntu server box to run FreeNAS. Now I read the vague '8GB is typically the minimum' and 'below 4GB prefetching is disabled' parts, so I figured my 2GB system is in the clear with reduced performance and features. No biggie.
But then I came on the forums and found out that, running ZFS with less than 8GB of RAM is completely ill advised regardless?
I have a single Xeon 2.8GHz (single core, dual socket but only one CPU in) server with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, running (currently) a 1TB mirrored ZFS pool. It's all SATA 1.5Gb/s.
I'm getting 110-115MByte/s read speeds and close to 50MByte/s write speeds. So performance is, basically, saturating gigabit. So the other issue I read, is that when transferring large files, you can get errors or kernel panics. Well, I 'backed up' my RAID before setting up FreeNAS, and copied back some 300GB of data, with lots and lots of 2, 3, 4 even 7 or 8GB single files. It ran at a constant throughput speed of about 58MByte/s, and never had any issues.
So I guess my question is.. what's the issue? I look at a machine that runs quite well, should I expect problems in the future or something? DDR2 is pricey, so I'm not going to upgrade this machine. I plan on building something new in the future, so spending any money on this box just doesn't make sense. I guess I could back everything up and rebuilt the pool as a UFS setup, but I'm failing to see why? I don't have any issues.
I have FreeNAS configured pretty much vanilla, and I'm running a CIFS share to my Windows box, and an NFS share to my linux and Mac boxes. The NFS share is the fastest, the CIFS share is a bit slower but still quick..