Re:An Introduction to ZFS
by pizza234 on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:56AM
(#25158605)
I've had a few BTRFS attempts a few years ago, and I ended up twice with a suddenly unbootable system. I stress that this was a few years ago though.
ZFS needs serious tweaking if you have performance-critical workloads. I experienced this on databases, when comparing against ext4 - at the very least, one needs to move the ZIL on a separate disk. Also, up to a short time ago, ZFS had performance problems with encrypted volumes, due to (let's call) formal issues with the kernel - as a matter of fact, it was slow on a laptop of mine.
All in all, I don't use BTRFS because of trust issues. The BTRFS is in a sort of "never stable" camp, which is not a good indicator of engineering practices. The nail in the coffin was for me that in the official FAQ, at least up to some time ago, there was the tragicomic cop-out statement that the concept of stability in software is just a matter of labeling, because all the software has bugs.
ZFS needs serious tweaking if you have performance-critical workloads. I experienced this on databases, when comparing against ext4 - at the very least, one needs to move the ZIL on a separate disk. Also, up to a short time ago, ZFS had performance problems with encrypted volumes, due to (let's call) formal issues with the kernel - as a matter of fact, it was slow on a laptop of mine.
All in all, I don't use BTRFS because of trust issues. The BTRFS is in a sort of "never stable" camp, which is not a good indicator of engineering practices. The nail in the coffin was for me that in the official FAQ, at least up to some time ago, there was the tragicomic cop-out statement that the concept of stability in software is just a matter of labeling, because all the software has bugs.