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To: patpro <patpro@patpro.net>, "Barry Pederson" <bp@barryp.org>
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Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:51:30 +0100
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From: "Ronald Klop" <ronald-freebsd8@klop.yi.org>
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Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: snapshot implementation
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On Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:29:53 +0100, patpro <patpro@patpro.net> wrote:

>
> On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:56:18 -0600, Barry Pederson <bp@barryp.org> wrot=
e:
>> "...there's virtually no overhead at all due to the copy-on-write
>> architecture. In fact, sometimes it is faster to take a snapshot rathe=
r
>> than free the blocks containing the old data!"
>>
>> That's certainly not the case with UFS snapshots, which can take a lon=
g
>> time to complete (we're talking freezing your machine's disk activity
>> for many minutes), and are limited to 20 total.
>
>
> UFS uses copy on write. But you say many minutes to complete? Don't you
> speak about dump(1), that uses snapshot as a basis to dump a live file
> system?
> I agree, UFS snapshot creation is not lightning-fast, but many minutes
> seems a lot to me, and I never experienced such a long creation time.

As far as I know UFS snapshots need to create a list of currently in use =
=20
blocks. This is O(n) on the size of the FS and pauses the FS during the =20
snapshot. On large FS's this can take a long time.
ZFS always maintains this list so it only needs to mark this list as =20
readonly to create a snapshot. This is O(1).

Ronald.