[rescue] [geeks] Solaris being discontinued? Linux as alternative

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

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I have a few production linux ZFS systems in place. It is extremely slow.
The load average on them can reach 40-50 from kernel activity if I'm
hitting that storage layer even in moderate iops. 
If I had the chance to go back, I'd most likely put the storage layer
on FreeNAS, and do iSCSI back to the linux system for their app layer.
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(sorry, mail client doesn't do quoting properly)

I found that there are certainly cases where bad things can happen. I think that Solaris' VM subsystem or memory mgmt is better than Linux also, and so the interaction of the way ZFS uses RAM, the Linux VM / memory subsystem, and probably other pieces I don't know about, reduces its performance.

My response was to increase the number of spindles and use SSDs for log and cache; this made it more tolerable. Basically if using ZFS on Linux you need to have "more" than if you use some other filesystem.  On the other hand, it is very nice to run scrub on 6TB of files and know that everything is fine.

Cheers

Patrick