OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

[Freddie Cash]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Jeremy Chadwick <jdc at parodius.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 05:19:14PM +0100, Jasse Jansson wrote:
>> On Feb 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Bill Hacker wrote:
>>> Robert Luciani wrote:
>>>> Freddie Cash wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>>> Wow 5 minutes?!
>>>> I don't think I'd be pushing it if I said that seems really slow. :S
>>>> On such a fast machine I'd be irritated if it took over a minute to
>>>> boot. On my
>>>> 3Ghz Athlon X2 w/ 2Gb RAM, DragonFly boots vkernels, hosting
>>>> services, and Gnome
>>>> in about a minute with my two 500Gb hammer drives.
>>>
>>> One minute 45 seconds into Xfce4 for a VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz, 2 GB DDR-533,
>>> all-hammerfs on 2 natacontrol RAID1 'antique' 60 GB PATA UDMA 100 HDD.
>>>
>>> One minute 4 seconds into Xfce4 for an Intel T2130 @ 1.86 GHz 2 GB ?
>>> RAM, 1 X 120 GB 2.5" HDD, DFLY on 33 GB ad0s1, UFS2 with one hammer
>>> partition.
>>>
>>> RIADz looks to be the wall-time hog....
>>
>> RAIDZ is known to be slow, even the main developers admit it if you
>> force them to it.
>
> I'd recommend the individual seeing ~5 minute boot times try disabling
> ZFS prefetching.  Place vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" in
> /boot/loader.conf and reboot the machine.

Prefetch is disabled.  The delays in the boot on this system are from
using a USB stick for the / partition.  From kernel load to desktop
load is about 2 minutes.   It takes about 2 minutes to get the kernel
and modules loaded, though.

However, my Debian Lenny station at work takes almost 5 minutes to get
to a KDE 4.2 desktop, and that's using a single SATA harddrive with
ext3 and xfs.  Doesn't botther me, though, as I reboot maybe once per
month, sometimes only once per quarter.  I've never really understood
the reasoning for 30-second boot times.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com