October 28th, 2008 | Published in Uncategorized
Conclusion? Unless you care a great deal about eking out every last byte (using a RAM disk, for example), LZJB seems like a much saner compression choice. Performance seem to improve, rather than degrade, and it doesn’t hog your CPU. I’m switching my ZFS volume to LZJB right now (on-the-fly changes - woo!) and will copy all my data so it gets the new compression settings. I’ll sacrifice some bytes, but that’s ok - performance is king.
Also, my theory that I’d always have idle CPU with modern multi-core chips so compression wouldn’t be a big deal seems to be false. Clearly, with gzip, it’s possible to hog your entire CPU if you’re doing big long writes. We don’t tend to do high-MB/s reads or writes, but it’s clearly something to think about. LZJB seems to be the right balance.
Some good notes on resource utilization in a large envronment
