Comments on: How much RAM is too little?

By: rs8200

rs8200 — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:03:29 +0000

I think that 2GB ram for 1TB of disk space for ZFS is only if you are running de-dup. BTW, I used to run FreeNAS 8.1 on a dell GX280 desktop with a 1.5 TB hard drive and 3.5GB of ram and it ran fairly well. I have since replaced it with dfly 2.10 with hammer and it seems to run a lot faster. I cant quantify it in anyway but everything just feels faster – NFS/SAMBA especially. I cant wait until 2.12 is released.

By: Venkatesh Srinivas

Venkatesh Srinivas — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:02:02 +0000

I’ve run a pair of 1.5 TB HAMMER filesystems for a while with 256 MB of RAM; worked well.

By: vermaden

vermaden — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:14:04 +0000

For long time (more then a year) my FreeBSD 8.1 based home NAS with 2 x 2TB drives (2TB ZFS mirror) worked nice with 512MB RAM, the only reasons for reboots were power outages that happen used to happen from time to time in a ‘not-a-server-room’ environment ;)

By: Alex Libman

Alex Libman — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:07:51 +0000

I’ve heard the recommendation that you need 2GB RAM for every 1TB of ZFS. I wonder what the same “rule of thumb” for UFS2 and HAMMER would be.

Heh, my first computer had 2MB RAM, upgraded to 4MB. It would take a bit of tweaking to get modern BSD’s to run on that… A lot of things have become very inefficient – it just blows my mind that the Gnome taskbar time display component eats up about 10MB!

By: ryv

ryv — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 03:29:33 +0000

I think of anything under 4GB of RAM as low-memory – how about that?!

And yet my server runs happily with 512MB :-)