In this blog post, we’ll look at how ZFS affects MySQL performance when used in conjunction.

ZFS and MySQL have a lot in common since they are both transactional software. Both have properties that, by default, favors consistency over performance. By doubling the complexity layers for getting committed data from the application to a persistent disk, we are logically doubling the amount of work within the whole system and reducing the output. From the ZFS layer, where is really the bulk of the work coming from?

Consider a comparative test below from a bare metal server. It has a reasonably tuned config (discussed in separate post, results and scripts here). These numbers are from sysbench tests on hardware with six SAS drives behind a RAID controller with a write-backed cache. Ext4 was configured with RAID10 softraid, while ZFS …