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Date:      Sat, 19 Sep 2015 09:04:48 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us>
To:        Sami Halabi <sodynet1@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ZFS cpu requirements, with/out compression and/or dedup
Message-ID:  <alpine.GSO.2.01.1509190843040.1673@freddy.simplesystems.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAEW%2BogbPswfOWQzbwNZR5qyMrCEfrcSP4Q7%2By4zuKVVD=KNuUA@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CAEW%2BogbPswfOWQzbwNZR5qyMrCEfrcSP4Q7%2By4zuKVVD=KNuUA@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sat, 19 Sep 2015, Sami Halabi wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> I've been searching the documentation, wiki.. etc. but found no rule of
> thumb to CPU requirements to run ZFS fs. for memory there are few rules
> according to using dedup or not.
>
> rules of thumb I concluded are so far:
> 1. use compression lz4.
> 2. use checksum.
> 3. disable atime.
>
> from what i read the status of dedup is not that clear and seems there are
> bugs and better to avoid it?

I am not so sure about dedup bugs.  Usually the problem encountered 
with dedup is unrealistic expectations about how it will behave. 
Dedup requires a large amount of RAM and/or L2ARC device which are 
appropriately sized for the amount of storage and the amount of 
redundancy encountered.  The problem typically encountered is that 
things work "fine" with dedup until one day they do not and when they 
do not, it is like going off a cliff.  Don't enable dedup unless you 
have carefully researched it, decided that its value outweighs its 
cost, and make sure that you have enough RAM or SSD-based L2ARC 
(preferably RAM) so that the tables it needs are all readily available 
without accessing rotating media.

Depending on what you were planning to use dedup for, there may be 
other zfs tricks (e.g. cloning) which are amost as effective, but 
without the risks.

> so according to 1-3 above what cpu requirements i need? is ATOM cpu like
> supermicro c2750/3/5/8 enough to run system of 20TB /40TB with 1-3 above?
> if dedup IS enabled would it still work fine?

CPU usage is rarely a problem for zfs except for when compression is 
involved.  Lz4 is supposed to be CPU-efficient on Intel CPUs.  Don't 
use gzip compression if you don't have a powerful CPU.  Compression 
can be changed at any time, although a given file will remain 
compressed with the compression setting in effect when it was created.

CPU use is driven by I/O requirements and selected compression 
algorithms and not by the size of the storage pool.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/



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