On Thu 15 Feb 2007 at 08:55AM, Host Expert wrote:
Hi,
Ok, thanks for comments.
Note also that Apple is including ZFS in the next generation of MacOS, so Solaris will not be your only choice.
How effective is ZFS ? I mean yeah, even Windows has file system compression... And what ? Is very poor...
You've not said how much performance you are willing to trade for space savings.
The compression currently in ZFS is a variant of Lempel-Ziv with some tweaks. This has the advantage of being fast and compresses moderately well; for the curious, see http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/common/os/... In my personal experience, it is lightweight enough that it's hard to know it is present without benchmarking. And as I said before, it has the curious property of *accelerating* some workloads.
Adam Leventhal has done most of the work to include GZIP compression in ZFS, and we expect to see him check that in sometime "soon"; see http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/. The issue with GZIP is that it's not as fast. The good news is that you will be able to choose-- and since everything is an online operation, it's not too hard to switch things back and forth.
I fear that we are running the risk of hijacking this mailing list to talk about ZFS :) You may want to check out zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org and/or google for "zfs".
-dp-- Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - dp@eng.sun.com - blogs.sun.com/dp