How important is the CPU for ZFS?
I want to build a truenas server with the cheapest CPU I can find that can support ECC RAM: Celeron G4900T + 64gb ECC RAM + 4x18 TB SAS drives.
I don't have experience with ZFS or with truenas (core or scale), how much important is the CPU?
Use case: hundreds of thousands of small files mostly under 1 mb, but just 2-3 concurrent users
6 replies
You don't mention your performance requirements and I'm unfamiliar with that CPU. Are you trying to saturate your 1G presumably NIC? Reads or writes?
No, just thousands of small files. Windows takes around a minute to enumerate all the files in the main share via SMB
You should be good, then. Probably don't need SSDs for ZIL and L2RC either. Don't forget to schedule a weekly scrub, to catch bit rot. Essential for large drives.
ZFS tends to be more RAM intensive so make certain you have, at bare minimum around 16GB. But I would push for more.
It’s ok until you start using jails or dedup.
In my (admittedly) limited experience with ZFS, it utilizes more RAM than CPU except for scrubs.
If you’re wondering about the downvotes, I got brigaded by PRC simps. Lemmy doesn’t yet have the protection against this that Reddit had.