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Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

As pointed out in the comments on that thread, be aware that essentially all of the negatives about ZFS boil down to FUD. In particular, upstream is emphatically not dead (the recent OpenZFS summit[1] was packed -- as was the hackathon the next day), which can be easily verified just by looking at the commits to illumos.[2] As for "well known data base [sic] degradation", all I can say is that we run ZFS as a backend for Postgres all over our public cloud -- both ourselves as part of SmartDataCenter[3] and Manta[4] and with high profile customers -- and we have not seen any ZFS-related performance issues. And please don't get me started on the Oracle-related FUD...

[1] http://open-zfs.org/wiki/OpenZFS_Developer_Summit

[2] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commits/master

[3] https://github.com/joyent/sdc

[4] https://github.com/joyent/manta

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I don't think you can really blame people for perceiving Solaris fragments floating around in space as dead projects. OpenIndiana for example is reeking of death and the last time I tried to upgrade my home storage server from OpenSolaris to OpenIndiana the new boot environment was completely hosed. Yes I realize there are also dozens of other (some useless, some abandoned) distros of illumos.

Comments about Oracle are not FUD. Having a project that is in any way related to Oracle is like having a psychotic murderer living in the flat upstairs. People may be understandably reluctant to come over for tea.

OpenIndiana is pretty moribund lately, yeah, and there are certainly other abandoned distros. The two really "alive" Illumos distributions are SmartOS and OmniOS. Each gets regular updates, and is backed by a company that uses the distribution in-house (SmartOS is from Joyent, and OmniOS is from OmniTI). SmartOS PXE or USB-boots and is designed as a "cloud" OS substrate for starting up Zones where real work is done, and optionally works together with SmartDataCenter (also by Joyent) to orchestrate multiple machines; OmniOS is a more traditional hdd-installable server OS.

They're both perfectly usable and non-dead, although the situation of distros so strongly dependent on a single vendor each does worry me a bit (I feel more comfortable in the long-term stability of e.g. FreeBSD).

Non-dead, perhaps, but struggling, e.g.: http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/OmniOSNo10GF...

Note that the first comment there is an illumos developer offering to help -- and when Chris tweeted about this issue, he was offered similar help from the community.[1] It would be great to have a better characterization of this issue (which is not as simple as it not working, but rather is apparently a performance pathology that appears under load) -- it's entirely possible (if not likely) that this is (just) a driver bug, and not emblematic of larger issues. Certainly, taken alone it does not indicate that the OS is "struggling" (speaking for ourselves, we're 10G everywhere -- though not 10GBASE-T).

[1] https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/517404451121143809

We forked this system four-and-a-half years ago, and have done a ton of work in the open; at this point, we identify ourselves much more strongly with illumos than we ever did with Solaris. We also have plenty of folks who have contributed to illumos who never worked for Sun and never contributed to Solaris; to us in the illumos community these are not "Solaris fragments" any more than they are "SVR4 fragments."

As for Oracle, trust me that I hate them as much as anyone[1], but raising Oracle with respect to illumos absolutely is FUD: the project isn't related to Oracle in any way (or any more than it is related to AT&T, which also holds copyright). Even where there are Oracle copyrights, this is open source, and the CDDL is an air-tight license that (sadly) has been battle-tested by Oracle's own lawyers. Thanks to the explicitness of the CDDL around things like patent, there really isn't much that Oracle can do. And indeed, given the massive Oracle-owned Solaris patent portfolio, the same cannot be said for other non-CDDL systems that may infringe those patents -- illumos is (perversely) the only one actually sheltered from Oracle bad behavior in that regard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=34m0s

Ok it _is_ FUD but I'm saying I can understand it.

Could not have said it better myself. It's disappointing to see a post with such unfounded nonsense rated so high on HN.

To be fair, author did say he shouldn't be considered an expert and his experience was extremely limited.

i'm sorry but "i'm no expert" is not an excuse for trying to change people's minds. that's how anti-vaxxers are born.

Indeed. This is the "Appeal to Lack of Authority" fallacy [1]

Authority has a reputation for being corrupt and inflexible, and this stereotype has been leveraged by some who assert that their own lack of authority somehow makes them a better authority.

Starling might say of the 9/11 attacks: "Every reputable structural engineer understands how fire caused the Twin Towers to collapse."

Bombo can reply: "I'm not an expert in engineering or anything, I'm just a regular guy asking questions."

Starling: "We should listen to what the people who know what they're talking about have to say."

Bombo: "Someone needs to stand up to these experts."

The idea that not knowing what you're talking about somehow makes you heroic or more reliable is incorrect. More likely, your lack of expertise simply makes you wrong.

[1] http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4217

> "well known data base [sic] degradation"

Came in here to refute this as well. We've been running PostgreSQL on ZFS (ZoL) at MixRank, and it's been holding up very well. We switched from EXT primarily for compression which gives us ~2x savings on IO throughput.

Is there any particular PostgreSQL or ZFS configuration that is necessary?

I vaguely remember something about turning off the ZIL for the data files, because the WAL provides the integrity. Or the other way round. Or something else.

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