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Storage VPS: ZFS or ext4?

VPS Hosting by svendeal 30 replies 2.5K views
svendeal

Member OP

Deal Sniper

12 #1

Got a 512MB "storage" special from InterServer (https://www.interserver.net/vps/), 500GB disk, $18/yr. ARE YOU KIDDING, SNAPPED IT UP instantly. Now wondering if ZFS is usable or if I should just go ext4. Plan is media + backups, nothing critical.

Tested both on identical VMs.

  • ZFS: compression is nice, snapshots are NICE, but ARC ate 200MB idle
  • ext4: boring, works, 40MB overhead

With 512MB total that's half my RAM gone to ZFS.

Anyone running ZFS tuned for low memory? Or is this just ext4 territory?

world record: 4min Arch install
RA

Member

#2

Kiddo listen up. ZFS on 512MB is shitf-key territory. U need to tune that ARC down to nothing or u will swapon death. ext4 is boring but it works. I run ZFS on 1GB minimum kiddo!

minh1987

Member

#3

Young man, in my professional opinion from 1987, you are asking the wrong question. The Google did not exist then and we managed. I ran AIX on 16MB. ZFS is MODERN bloat. Use ext4 and be done with it. Two spaces for clarity, young man.

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
BL

Member

#4
rahul_astra said:
ZFS on 512MB is shitf-key territory

What he said but with actual numbers. Set 

zfs_arc_max=67108864
and 
zfs_arc_min=0
. That's 64MB max ARC. Compression still works, snapshots still work. You feel it on repeated reads but for media storage who cares.

I run this exact tune on a BuyVM 512MB slice in LU. 400GB, $15/yr. Not InterServer but same idea.

svendeal

Member OP

Deal Sniper

#5
blucore said:
That's 64MB max ARC.

Tried that, still seeing 120MB+ in htop under "buff/cache" that doesn't drop under memory pressure like normal cache. Is that ZFS or am I chasing ghosts?

Also BuyVM in LU -- how's the pipe to US? InterServer Secaucus is 2ms from my parents' house.

world record: 4min Arch install
KK

Member

#6

It's ZFS. The ARC reports into buff/cache on Linux even when capped. Your 64MB cap is real, the rest is the kernel page cache holding compressed blocks. 

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
will show you the real split.

I'm on a 1GB RamNode in NYC, ZFS with 128MB ARC. Same datacenter region as Secaucus basically. For backups it doesn't matter. For media you stream once, cache miss, stream again, still cache miss. The ARC is doing nothing for you anyway.

Berlin1

Member

#7

Your 'cloud' is just someone else's computer with marketing and ZFS is just someone else's filesystem with memory hunger. ext4, LUKS if you care, rsnapshot or restic for "snapshots." Done. 512MB is not a negotiation.

WA

Member

6 #8
Berlin1 said:
ext4, LUKS if you care

LUKS overhead on a 512MB VM? The dm-crypt threads eat CPU doing 500GB of media. Better to encrypt at rest on the provider side if they offer it, or just... not. It's backups and media.

Frankfurt here, I have Hetzner Storage Box for real backups, rsync over wireguard. The VPS is just a cache layer. ext4, noatime, done.

FI

Member

#9

Hetzner Storage Box is the real answer here. €9.53/TB/month, no VPS RAM games. I keep a small ext4 VPS for the active stuff, sync nightly. London to Nuremberg is fine over wireguard.

The InterServer deal is cute but you're solving the wrong problem trying to make ZFS work on 512MB.

svendeal

Member OP

Deal Sniper

#10

Not wrong, just cheap. €9.53/TB is €47.65 for 5TB. My $18 is $18. Different math for "nothing critical."

Still curious if anyone's run ZFS with 

primarycache=metadata
on this little RAM. That's the last thing I haven't tried.

world record: 4min Arch install

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