> In #postgresql on freenode, somebody ever mentioned that ZFS from Solaris > helps a lot to the performance of pgsql, so dose anyone have information > about that? the filesystem you use will affect the performance of postgres significantly. I've heard a lot of claims for ZFS, unfortunantly many of them from people who have prooven that they didn't know what they were talking about by the end of their first or second e-mails. much of the hype for ZFS is it's volume management capabilities and admin tools. Linux has most (if not all) of the volume management capabilities, it just seperates them from the filesystems so that any filesystem can use them, and as a result you use one tool to setup your RAID, one to setup snapshots, and a third to format your filesystems where ZFS does this in one userspace tool.
Even though those posters may have proven them selves wrong, zfs is still a very handy fs and it should not be judged relative to these statements.
once you seperate the volume management piece out, the actual performance question is a lot harder to answer. there are a lot of people who say that it's far faster then the alternate filesystems on Solaris, but I haven't seen any good comparisons between it and Linux filesystems.
One could install pg on solaris 10 and format the data-area as ufs and then as zfs and compare import- and query-times and other benchmarking but comparing ufs/zfs to Linux-filesystems would also be a comparison of those two os'es. -- regards Claus
