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[–] 7 points 9 months ago* (10 children)

ZFS seems pretty RAM hungry

This is a common misunderstanding.

Short version; ZFS isn't RAM hungry, it's RAM aware. If your system has unused memory lying around, ZFS will use it to improve read performance. But it will give up that memory the moment anything else needs it.

and I don’t believe you can add new drives to an existing volume.

No longer true

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  • [+] [S] 2 points 9 months ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    It does take time to free ram. If you need the ram for other things it is best practice to limit the arc cache

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    Only when you have to write out to swap. In the case of something like ZFS, it stores data in RAM, looks for it there, then looks on the disk. So freeing up the RAM is effectively instantaneous; you just mark the space as free, then the other process writes into it.

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