On 18/02/2012 11:36, Da Rock wrote:

Yes -- ZFS uses RAM heavily to improve performance. I've a VM running ZFS with only 1GB which is pretty slow. Mind you, a similar VM with UFS is also pretty slow.

For an actual machine, about 4GB makes a reasonable ZFS system. More is better though; 8GB is what I'd recommend. ZFS speed is on the whole pretty reasonable. It doesn't do small, randomized IO very effectively, so it's not ideal to run a database on. Other than that, for a home e-mail / web /fileserver ZFS is just fine.

I haven't tried SSDs or anything like that -- that's an optimization to improve latency when accessing lots of different files, and my usage doesn't really justify it. Try it without before spending any money on SSDs. It may well be good enough, but if it isn't then adding SSDs and making ZFS use them for ZIL or cache is pretty simple (and doesn't require any downtime.)

Cheers,

Matthew