zfs compression : use it!

Posted on April 19, 2016  •  1 minutes  • 141 words  •  Suggest Changes

I’m playing with ZFS for a while now and I read that compression should be turned on, on pretty much anything that has a decent CPU. Most of our data is already compressed, so our idea was, why take the speed hit for no real advantage … A second machine was bought, and I decided to ignore my colleague’s and try to copy our badly to compress data and see what ratio’s are…

You can see compression using :

# zfs get all | grep compr
huginn                 compressratio         1.33x                   -
huginn                 compression           lz4                     local
huginn/stuff           compressratio         1.21x                   -
huginn/stuff           compression           lz4                     inherited from huginn
huginn/statstuff       compressratio         1.35x                   -
huginn/statstuff       compression           lz4                     inherited from huginn

21-30% compression … for uncompressable data that is pretty nice ! So without delay : activate compression like this :

zfs set compression=lz4 dataset

Jeej for zfs!