[NCLUG] ZFS RAID-Z2 for /home on Ubuntu 12.04

[Jesse Griffin]

Hi Phil,

Which pool is slow?

It may help if you post the output of `zpool status [poolname]` and also `zpool
get all [poolname]`.

Thank you,
Jesse Griffin
tummy.com, ltd.

On 08/28/2013 04:21 PM, Phil Marsh wrote:
> Hi,
> My ZFS pools appear to be up and running.
> I have a mirror (2 drives using a partition on each drive for the mirrorz pool) for some of / except /etc /dev /lib /home and a few of the other essential directories (minimum to allow booting prior to mounting the pools).
> My /home is mounted on a RAIDZ2 four drive.
> I am apparently getting really slow reads and writes - relative to standard mdadm mirrors and RAIDs. My CPU is a quad-core Intel from 2007 with 8GB 800MH DDR2 RAM.
> Any ideas?
> iostat -v shows < 20MB/sec and typically < 1MB/sec
> Thanks,
> Phil
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On Aug 28, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Michael Milligan <milli at acmeps.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 08/12/2013 10:06 AM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>>> I have never run /home on ZFS, but I have no reason to expect it wouldn't
>>> work.  I would use the zfs-on-linux version rather than the FUSE version if
>>> I were starting today, but all my systems use FUSE because that is what I
>>> had tested for my backups applications, predating the zfs-on-linux project.
>>>
>>> I would probably set it up as a pool called "storage" or similar, and then
>>> create a "home" ZFS under that pool, and set that up with a mountpoint of
>>> /home.  It should get mounted on boot as part of the ZFS startup.
>>>
>>> However, I haven't used the zfs-on-linux code, so there are likely some
>>> details that I'm just not aware of here.  But the overall plan of using ZFS
>>> for /home seems solid.
>>
>> Just a data point to add, I switched to zfs-on-linux several years ago,
>> and there were some bumps, but the 0.6.x code has been rock solid late
>> last year and this.  Compiles on all kernels in Ubuntu up through 3.8.0
>> with DKMS, no problems.  And it's significantly faster than the FUSE
>> variant, though I did not do extensive benchmarking.
>>
>> That said, I have /not/ trusted it with root (/) or even /home, so
>> haven't tried that, but it should work fine at this point.  That was one
>> of the bumps early on.
>>
>> FWIW, the switch from FUSE was trivial, don't even have to "zpool
>> upgade" the pools if you don't want, it will run with an older pool rev.
>>
>> Another data point, I've been running Debian/kFreeBSD for a while too,
>> rock solid with native ZFS pool and a mountpoint for root (/).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Mike
>>
>> -- 
>> Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com
>>
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