Upgrading ZFS pools after installing 9.1

[craigyb]

I built my FreeNas box to replace 4 Thecus 5200 systems which have served me well for many years, but I decided to build one large NAS as opposed to 4 systems.

Anyways, I have been fairly disappointed with the FreeNAS system when I built it with 8.3 P2, when using my PC to connect to the largest of my NAS partitions it could take about 10-15 seconds to get a directory listing, considering it was across 10 spindles this was bad in my mind. I had a lag setup with two interfaces, a bit overkill, but even that didn't help.

I even upgraded my HBA from a SATA 2 to SATA 3 to se if that helped, still not much improvement, system still laggy and taking ages to bring up the contents of the filesystem. Once I did get there the performamce was reasonable. But I also had other issues, my DUNE HD media player didn't like the slow speed of the NAS either and neither did the Mede8er MED600X3D High Definition 3D Multimedia Player.

So last night I upgraded the media pools from the 8.3 installation to the new 9.1.1 version of ZFS using the zfspool upgrade command and suddenly the performance improved massively. The same partition now displays instantly on my PC and the media players seems happy as well. So I would recommend anyone moving from 8.3 to 9.1 to upgrade any pools as well.

 

[Yatti420]

Were your pools zfs v15 previously? I thought performance went the other way when upgrading ZFS pools.. Did you make any changes on your router or anything else aswell as the update?

 

[cyberjock]

For pools, usually slower.
But this is actually due to changes in hard drive accessing in FreeBSD 9.

 

[craigyb]

Well it's bizarre because I've been running 9.1 for about 4 weeks with no improvements in performance despite native support for the DC7280 32 channel HBA that I was using. I've then done various upgrades to 9.1.1 Beta 2, beta 5 and RC2 and the R750 HBA with SATA 3 with again no improvements. I was about to increase the RAM/motherboard to 64GB Xeon, but now I can save myself some money.

I only upgraded the pools two days ago and the improvement was immediate, so that doesn't seem like a 9.1 disk access

 

[Yatti420]

Ok.. What pools were people on previously? ZFS V15? I ask this because I never did an actual update from ZFSV28 to ZFSV5000? Same thing? No upgrade required?.. This is when I moved from 8 to 9 I believe.. Thanks,

 

[craigyb]

Yes ZFSV28 to ZFSV5000, but unfortunately my speed increase has been short lived, testing today the NAS seems just as laggy over CIFS/Samba

 

[Yatti420]

Pool capacity has an effect.. I didn't realize an update was required for V28 to V5000.. I'm still on v28 as far as I know.. Alert light = green.. When V28 was avail It was yellow light until upgrade..

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, presumably that's because you are getting "off the beaten path". V5000 is the open source continuation of ZFS. Oracle has it's own that has continued with v29+. Effectively the open source community has "forked" ZFS.