[geeks] Choice of filesystem for /var

[Francois Dion]

On 10/19/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Thu, 19 Oct 2006 @ 13:12 +0200, Miichael Vergalen said:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > for the /var filesystem wich I' going to move to a bigger set of disks
> > what do you recommend to use as filesystem ? I was thinking of placing
> > /var on either a zfs filesystem  or  a  raid1  filesystem.... but I
> > don't know what would be the best for this filesystem because it gets
> > written to a lot with all the logs etc.
>
> Personally I would not use zfs, but rather a stripped down ufs with any
> non-essential metadata turned off for speed.  Tune it for your most
> common files, if you think you need it.
>
> I don't think the overhead of zfs is worth it.
>
> It does lead to a question for the ZFS experts though: can you turn
> things like atime modification off in ZFS and if so, does it gain a lot
> of speed like it does for other filesystems?

zfs set atime=off pool/log

You gain the same as any other. But much more than this, if it's a log
and in text format, setting compression=on dwarfs everything else.
There are 25 properties in all that can be set similarly. Then there
is stuff like vq_max_pending, vdev_prefetch etc..

If you want to figure out what is the compression ratio:
zfs get compressratio pool/log

My oracle home with all the binary stuff still compresses 1.6x, surprisingly.

Francois