A new article of mine with the title “Tuning ZFS on FreeBSD” has been published in the August 2012 issue of the free online publication BSD Magazine (pages 10-15). The target group of this magazine are novice and advanced FreeBSD users.
Link to the free issue: BSD Magazine 08/2012
Abstract:
ZFS is a modern 128-bit file system based on the copy-on-write model. This article presents optimization recommendations for ZFS on the FreeBSD operating system, including ARC and L2ARC caches, file-level and device-level prefetch and application-specific settings. The recommendations are based on evaluation of measurement data, expert opinions and user experience. Many of the optimizations are performed by modifying sysctl(8) and loader(8) tunables. To provide supportive data for tuning decisions, the measurement tools zfs-stats and zfs-mon are introduced. The targeted ZFS version is 28, available since FreeBSD 8.3 and 9.0.