If you are a regular reader of this blog, you likely know I like the ZFS filesystem a lot. ZFS has many very interesting features, but I am a bit tired of hearing negative statements on ZFS performance. It feels a bit like people are telling me “Why do you use InnoDB? I have read that MyISAM is faster.” I found the comparison of InnoDB vs. MyISAM quite interesting, and I’ll use it in this post.
To have some data to support my post, I started an AWS i3.large instance with a 1000GB gp2 EBS volume. A gp2 volume of this size is interesting because it is above the burst IOPS level, so it offers a constant 3000 IOPS performance level.
I used sysbench to create a table of 10M rows and then, using export/import tablespace, I copied it 329 times. I ended up with 330 tables for a total size of about 850GB. The dataset generated by sysbench is not very compressible, so I used lz4 compression in ZFS. …
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