this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
99 points (92.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40767 readers
878 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn't be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can't downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn't go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Meh. I run proxmox and other boot drives on ext4, data drives on xfs. I don't have any need for additional features in btrfs. Shrinking would be nice, so maybe someday I'll use ext4 for data too.

I started with zfs instead of RAID, but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it, whereas I could just configure RAID 10 once and be done with it. The performance differences are insignificant, since most of the work it does happens in the background.

You can benchmark them if you care about performance. You can find plenty of discussion by googling "ext vs xfs vs btrfs" or whichever ones you're considering. They haven't changed that much in the past few years.

[–] WhyJiffie 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it,

I spent none, and it works fine. what was your issue?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I have four 6tb data drives and 32gb of RAM. When I set them up with zfs, it claimed quite a few gb of RAM for its cache. I tried allocating some of the other NVMe drive as cache, and tried to reduce RAM usage to reasonable levels, but like I said, I found that I was spending a lot of time fiddling instead of just configuring RAID and have it running just fine in much less time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can ignore the RAM usage, it's just cache. It uses up to half your RAM by default but if other things need it zfs will just clear RAM for that to happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

That might be what was supposed to happen, but when I started up the VMs I saw memory contention.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Proxmox only supports btrfs or ZFS for raid

Or at least that's what I thought

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Not on Proxmox