Advice on moving from ZFS to BTRFS

Maher Khalil

Member
Jul 11, 2021
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I tried proxmox 6 and 7 in production with ZFS and RAM was the bottleneck
Now, I am thinking to move from ZFS to BTRFS that my customers need snapshot and fore data safety and myself want better RAM saving
any advice in this part
 
what about RAM performance. is it like ZFS or better?
i need only snapshot with raid 1 for mirror disks
 
Why don't you just limit the amount of RAM ZFS can use instead of moving to BTRFS?
 
I think limiting of ZFS RAM will not resolve the issue of it is eating RAM
RAM is expensive and required for customers
I like ZFS and I am using it in my private PC but I think it is suitable for private cloud not for public cloud where cost is very important
 
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ZFS by default will use up to 50% of the hosts RAM for its ARC for caching. So if you for example got 2x 1TB SSDs and 64GB RAM it will use up to 32GB RAM. But ZFS can easily work with way less RAM. For such a setup a 4 GB ARC should work too. I wouldn't recommend to limit the ARC too low, because it can get slow, but you can definitly limit it to more reasonable amounts. Just lower the ARC step by step and run arc_summary to check when the hit rates and free dnode/metadata cache get too low and then stop lowering it.
 
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