Moving...

Moving...

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

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...

Kind regards to all.

-- 
Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> http://petaramesh.org PGP 9076E32E

Re: Moving...

[Roman Mamedov]

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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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Re: Moving...

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

Le 02/04/2013 19:04, Roman Mamedov a écrit :
> but at this point I trust my data to BTRFS more, than I would trust ZFS.

My experience with ZFS on Linux is still somewhat limited, the only
thing that I can say is that I've used it for about 2 years and a half
on my (quite loaded) home server without ever encoutering a single issue
(besides some tricky Ubuntu version upgrades, only due to the fact that
ZFS is "not in the standard kernel" by opposition to BTRFS).

On the BTRFS side, I've used it on 5 machine for about a year on a daily
basis ; I've completely lost a filesystem, beyond repair, twice ; I
found myself with a machine that wouldn't boot anymore and would
necessitate serious and tricky FS maintenance, 3 times, I had to
completely reinstall the FS because of extremely degraded performance, 4
times.

Add to this that the FS management tools and properly working FS
features are an order of magnitude better in ZFS than in BTRFS...

That's enough for me...

I've already converted 2 machines from BTRFS to ZFS since yesterday.

My netbook (now ZFS) boots to GDM in less than 30 seconds. My son's same
machine (except for the FS) takes 75 MORE seconds.

You get it.

Kind regards.

-- 
Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> http://petaramesh.org PGP 9076E32E
Ne cherchez pas : Je ne suis pas sur Facebook.

Re: Moving...

[Harald Glatt]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> wrote:
> Le 02/04/2013 19:04, Roman Mamedov a écrit :
>> but at this point I trust my data to BTRFS more, than I would trust ZFS.
>
> My experience with ZFS on Linux is still somewhat limited, the only
> thing that I can say is that I've used it for about 2 years and a half
> on my (quite loaded) home server without ever encoutering a single issue
> (besides some tricky Ubuntu version upgrades, only due to the fact that
> ZFS is "not in the standard kernel" by opposition to BTRFS).
>
> On the BTRFS side, I've used it on 5 machine for about a year on a daily
> basis ; I've completely lost a filesystem, beyond repair, twice ; I
> found myself with a machine that wouldn't boot anymore and would
> necessitate serious and tricky FS maintenance, 3 times, I had to
> completely reinstall the FS because of extremely degraded performance, 4
> times.
>
> Add to this that the FS management tools and properly working FS
> features are an order of magnitude better in ZFS than in BTRFS...
>
> That's enough for me...
>
> I've already converted 2 machines from BTRFS to ZFS since yesterday.
>
> My netbook (now ZFS) boots to GDM in less than 30 seconds. My son's same
> machine (except for the FS) takes 75 MORE seconds.
>
> You get it.
>
> Kind regards.
>
> --
> Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> http://petaramesh.org PGP 9076E32E
> Ne cherchez pas : Je ne suis pas sur Facebook.
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

I don't find it too suprising that you have more problems with a
filesystem that is not final than with one that has seen several years
of post-final improvements. I would be shocked if ZFS were in worse
shape than btrfs right now.

Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: Moving...

[Uncle Stoatwarbler]

On 02/04/13 18:14, Swâmi Petaramesh wrote:

> My netbook (now ZFS) boots to GDM in less than 30 seconds. My son's same
> machine (except for the FS) takes 75 MORE seconds.

my (5 year old) laptop with a relatively slow SSD in it boots to GDM 
(Mint LXDE) in about 5 seconds with ext4. A 9 year old laptop fitted 
with a very slow PATA SSD takes about 9 seconds to do the same.

I'm not so sure that ZFS is a good fit for single drive machines ((Nor 
is ext4 for SSDs for that matter), but I'm happy to be corrected.

What I do know from banging hard on both is that I'd far sooner trust 
ZFS in an enterprise environment than BTRFS (or XFS), because I'm not 
really that happy about the idea of having to periodically restore 
500Tb+ of data from backups. Speed is a secondary issue, but ZFS is 
definitely faster at large scale.

There's a lot of wheel reinvention going on and I feel there must be 
some way of merging the good parts of both sets of code, then moving on.

Re: [zfs-discuss] Re: Moving...

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

Le 03/04/2013 10:47, Uncle Stoatwarbler a écrit :
> my (5 year old) laptop with a relatively slow SSD in it boots to GDM
> (Mint LXDE) in about 5 seconds with ext4. A 9 year old laptop fitted
> with a very slow PATA SSD takes about 9 seconds to do the same.

I've been using Linux daily since 1996, all distros, on every imaginable
hardware (but not on modern SSDs). I've never seen such performance
anywhere. Would be extremely curious about the distro, filesystem and
setup of the "9 year old laptop fitted with a very slow PATA SSD" that
boots to GDM in 9 seconds...

-- 
Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> http://petaramesh.org PGP 9076E32E
Ne cherchez pas : Je ne suis pas sur Facebook.

Re: Moving...

[Goffredo Baroncelli]

On 04/02/2013 07:14 PM, Swâmi Petaramesh wrote:
> Le 02/04/2013 19:04, Roman Mamedov a écrit :
>> but at this point I trust my data to BTRFS more, than I would trust ZFS.
> 
> My experience with ZFS on Linux is still somewhat limited, the only
> thing that I can say is that I've used it for about 2 years and a half
> on my (quite loaded) home server without ever encoutering a single issue
> (besides some tricky Ubuntu version upgrades, only due to the fact that
> ZFS is "not in the standard kernel" by opposition to BTRFS).
> 
> On the BTRFS side, I've used it on 5 machine for about a year on a daily
> basis ; I've completely lost a filesystem, beyond repair, twice ; I
> found myself with a machine that wouldn't boot anymore and would
> necessitate serious and tricky FS maintenance, 3 times, I had to
> completely reinstall the FS because of extremely degraded performance, 4
> times.
> 
> Add to this that the FS management tools and properly working FS
> features are an order of magnitude better in ZFS than in BTRFS...
> 
> That's enough for me...

With these experiences, I am not surprise that you changed the filesystem.

However I would like to report my experience which is quite positive
regarding btrfs. I used BTRFS as root filesystem for about two-three
years. And I encountered two filesystem corruption.

The first one was due to a bug in BTRFS. I don't remember the details,
it was due to a problem with the linking a file between two subvolumes.
However the filesystem worked well, the only problem which I had was the
in-ability to remove a file (the link).

The second problem was due a hardware fault: the power supply was
insufficient, so sometime the hard disk returned errors. With scrub I
was able to find the files corrupted and to recreate the metadata (which
in BTRFS is DUP-ed).
This problem happened several time before I replaced the power supply;
and the filesystem worked well (with the exception of the corrupted file
of course).

May be that I was very lucky or you was very un-lukcy.
I hope that with ZFS you will be able to solve all your problems.

> 
> I've already converted 2 machines from BTRFS to ZFS since yesterday.
> 
> My netbook (now ZFS) boots to GDM in less than 30 seconds. My son's same
> machine (except for the FS) takes 75 MORE seconds.

The BTRFS performance are not the best, but good enough. May be that
BTRFS require more memory than other filesystem, so it is not good for
old computer. For my old laptop I had to revert to ext4.

However I have to point out that am not a fan of the test "time to
login": I prefer the responsiveness of the system, and with the latest
kernel (IIRC from 3.6/3.7 onwards) this was a lot improved.

> 
> You get it.
> 
> Kind regards.
> 


-- 
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Key fingerprint BBF5 1610 0B64 DAC6 5F7D  17B2 0EDA 9B37 8B82 E0B5