Re: Moving...

[Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.ru>]

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On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:24:39 +0200
Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> wrote:

> Goodbye BTRFS, hello ZFS :-)
> 
> I'm finally making the move, I couldn't stand the terrible BTRFS
> performance anymore, and spending 2 long minutes waiting for the HD LED
> to come off everytime I clicked anywhere.
> 
> Did what I could, got the latest kernels, defragged, removed BTRFS
> snapshots, to no avail...
> 
> So I'm in process of moving the 3 main laptops in here from BTRFS to ZFS...


Whatever works for you --

but at this point I trust my data to BTRFS more, than I would trust ZFS.

(of course having current backups etc).

The following may not sound like a compliment to BTRFS; but on my filesystems
with heavy snapshotting, recently I am trialling a practice to run major apps
like a mail client and a browser via "eatmydata", which overrides and NOOPs
fsync. Since in any case I have "sync; btrfs sub snap...." on those machines
set to every 30 minutes in crontab, the potential of data loss due to
"eatmydata" is never too great.

I noticed the general experience is a lot snappier this way. You could try at
least to verify whether or not your HD LED issues (:D) are indeed caused by
slow fsyncs, or by something else.

I should note that I currently use a 3.7 series kernel, and haven't upgraded
to 3.8 and 3.9 yet, AFAIK those had some fsync improvements which might render
this trick useless. But this still doesn't change the fact that apps in
general seem to over-use fsync.

-- 
With respect,
Roman

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