From: "Russell Coker" <russell@coker.com.au>
<andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
Did you even read what was already posted? " ... and I run ZFS on 3GB and 4GB RAM boxes ...." -- that's fine, but how much storage.
My smallest ZFS server box with 3GB of RAM has 350 GB in disk space (a mirror). But it desnot run a fileserver. Icinga is running on it (which will write a bit but not hammering) and some "smaller" apps (DHCP and DNS server etc.) I have a 2 GB RAM laptop with PC-BSD and ZFS. It works. (It's not the greatest laptop ever, though. I just wanted to try PC-BSD)
I've had RAM problems on a system with 4G of RAM running not much apart from Samba.
The "big" samba server is on a 16GB RAM server (sharing it with a few other apaches etc.)
I don't think that zfsonlinux has changed much since then.
ZFS just manages memory differently from anything that was developed for Linux. Changing that would require significant code changes which would be another potential source of stability problems.
Yes. ARC is a bit of a "parasite". Think of a storage controller grabbing a few GigaByte of RAM;-) BTW: I am happy to be convinced about systemd advantages:-) I also would like to know how it fits in containers, e.g. if you run them for hosting. The German magazine iX had an article about Linux containers recently. It compared them with FreeBSD jails too. Amongst others, it was a bit elusive about "some security concerns" but did not elaborate further. FreeBSD jail seems to be quite small in "coding footprint" which makes an audit not that difficult. Not having /proc and /sys helps too. The devfs rules are easy to understand and minimize the risks. I wonder whether someone can add something to the Linux container coding/admin/security side. Regards Peter