OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

[Freddie Cash]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Bill Hacker <wbh at conducive.org> wrote:
> Side issue again - just brought up DFLY 2.3.0, default all-hammer layout.
>
> - atop a natacontrol RAID1 on a pair of salvaged 60 GB IBM 'Deathstars'.
> - VIA C7 1.5 GHz CPU (the el-cheapo MB aimed at Wal-Mart)
> - pulled half the RAM, leaving only 1GB
>
> Periodically, the aged IBM's sound like squirrels having a go in a gravel
> pit, Xfce4 is *very* slow, but it hadn't started swapping, and based on what
> 'top' is showing should actually work decently for basic file, web, or mail
> serving, especially as the OpenSSL recognizes the VIA padlock engine.
>  Planty fast enough with 2GB, BTW.
>
> ZFS is not famed for tolerating that meagre a resource ration as well as
> HAMMER....

ZFS on FreeBSD 7.1 runs well with 2 GB of RAM and a 2.6 GHz P4 CPU
(32-bit).  It just requires tuning of a couple of kernel tunables via
loader.conf.  It runs better with a 64-bit CPU and more RAM, but it is
perfectly usable with 2 GB.  Booting FreeBSD 7.1 into a full KDE 4.2
desktop takes less than 5 minutes.  This is using 3x 120 GB SATA
drives in a single raidz1.

ZFS will try to use every bit of RAM that it can as a cache.  But you
can limit how much it can use.  There are reports on the FreeBSD
mailing lists of people using it on laptops (slow drives), and on
systems with only 768 MB of RAM.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com