Recent Articles

ZFS compression: yes, you want this

Published by Jim Salter // February 24th, 2015


So ZFS dedup is a complete lose. What about compression?

Compression is a hands-down win. LZ4 compression should be on by default for nearly anything you ever set up under ZFS. I typically have LZ4 on even for datasets that will house database binaries… yes, really. Let’s look at two quick test runs, on a Xeon E3 server with 32GB ECC RAM and a pair of Samsung 850 EVO 1TB disks set up as a mirror vdev.

This is an inline compression torture test: we’re reading pseudorandom data (completely incompressible) and writing it to an LZ4 compressed dataset.

root@lab:/data# pv < in.rnd > incompressible/out.rnd
7.81GB 0:00:22 [ 359MB/s] [==================================>] 100%

root@lab:/data# zfs get compressratio data/incompressible
NAME                 PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
data/incompressible  compressratio  1.00x  -

359MB/sec write… yyyyyeah, I’d say LZ4 isn’t hurting us too terribly here – and this is a worst case scenario. What about something a little more realistic? Let’s try again, this time with a raw binary of my Windows Server 2012 R2 “gold” image (the OS is installed and Windows Updates are applied, but nothing else is done to it):

root@lab:/data/test# pv < win2012r2-gold.raw > realworld/win2012r2-gold.out
8.87GB 0:00:17 [ 515MB/s] [==================================>] 100%

Oh yeah – 515MB/sec this time. Definitely not hurting from using our LZ4 compression. What’d we score for a compression ratio?

root@lab:/data# zfs get compressratio data/realworld
NAME            PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
data/realworld  compressratio  1.48x  -

1.48x sounds pretty good! Can we see some real numbers on that?

root@lab:/data# ls -lh /data/realworld/win2012r2-gold.raw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 8.9G Feb 24 18:01 win2012r2-gold.raw
root@lab:/data# du -hs /data/realworld
6.2G	/data/realworld

8.9G of data in 6.2G of space… with sustained writes of 515MB/sec.

What if we took our original 8G of incompressible data, and wrote it to an uncompressed dataset?

root@lab:/data#  zfs create data/uncompressed
root@lab:/data# zfs set compression=off data/uncompressed
root@lab:/data# cat 8G.in > /dev/null ; # this is to make sure our source data is preloaded in the ARC
root@lab:/data# pv < 8G.in > uncompressed/8G.out
7.81GB 0:00:21 [ 378MB/s] [==================================>] 100% 

So, our worst case scenario – completely incompressible data – means a 5% performance hit, and a more real-world-ish scenario – copying a Windows Server installation – means a 27% performance increase. That’s on fast solid state, of course; the performance numbers will look even better on slower storage (read: spinning rust), where even worst-case writes are unlikely to slow down at all.

Yep, that’s a win.

  • "I honestly feel as though my business would not be where it is today were it not for us happening into the hiring of Jim Salter."

    W. Chris Clark, CPA // President // Clark Eustace Wagner, PA

  • "Jim’s advice has always been spot on – neither suggesting too little or too much. He understands that companies have limited resources and he does not offer up solutions beyond those that we have truly needed."

    Paul Yoo // President // US Patriot Tactical

  • "Jim Salter is an indispensable part of our team, maintaining our network and being proactive on all of our IT needs. We have comfort knowing that there are redundant bootable backups of all files and databases, offsite and onsite."

    Regina R. Floyd, AIA, LEED AP BD+C // Principal // Watson Tate Savory

  • Recent Thoughts

  • Demonstrating ZFS pool write distribution
  • One of my pet peeves is people talking about zfs “striping” writes across a pool. It doesn’t help any that zfs core developers use this terminology too – but it’s sloppy and not really correct. ZFS distributes writes among all the vdevs in a pool.  If your vdevs all have the same amount of free space available, this will resemble a simple striping action closely enough.  But if you have different amounts of free space on different […]