ZFS performance on FreeBSD

Tuesday, 09. 16. 2014  –  Category: sw

For a combined application and database server with considerable per-database MySQL buffers and lots of synchronous IO on SATA drives:

  • vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" – disable prefetch, even on systems with decent amounts of RAM. With prefetch enabled the server freezes under moderate database activity. The associated arc_summary stats are mixed, with almost 100% miss for some reads.
    
File-Level Prefetch: (HEALTHY)

DMU Efficiency:                                 4.36b
        Hit Ratio:                      82.85%  3.61b
        Miss Ratio:                     17.15%  748.47m

        Colinear:                               748.47m
          Hit Ratio:                    0.02%   170.47k
          Miss Ratio:                   99.98%  748.30m

        Stride:                                 3.48b
          Hit Ratio:                    100.00% 3.48b
          Miss Ratio:                   0.00%   68.37k

    An old mailing list posts suggest this is a “more or less known problem”.
  • vfs.zfs.arc_max="16G" – explicitly set a maximum amount of memory for ARC after working out what headroom is needed elsewhere. Otherwise ARC will cause pageouts for userland processes and it isn’t as good as getting out of the way as it is supposed to be. Sometimes this is visible as THROTTLED in arc_summary, with a non-zero throttle count.
    
ARC Summary: (THROTTLED)
        Storage pool Version:                   5000
        Filesystem Version:                     5
        Memory Throttle Count:                  8

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