[Dovecot] dsync redesign

[Robin]

On 3/29/2012 5:24 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> This happens with a lot of "fan boys".  There was so much hype
> surrounding ZFS that even many logically thinking people were frothing
> at the mouth waiting to get their hands on it.  Then, as with many/most
> things in the tech world, the goods didn't live up to the hype.

The problem with zfs especially is that there are so many different implementations, with only the commercial Sun, er, Oracle paid Solaris having ALL of the promised features and the bug-fixes to make them safely usable.  For those users, with very large RAM-backed Sun, er, Oracle, hardware, it probably works well.

FreeBSD and even the last versions of OpenSolaris lack fixes for some wickedly nasty box-bricking bugs in de-dup, as well as many of the "sexy" features in zpool that had people flocking to it in the first place.  

The bug database that used to be on the OpenSolaris portal by Sun's gone dark, but you may have some luck through archive.org.  I know when I tried it out for myself using the "Community Edition" of Solaris, I did feel annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and the RAM requirements to run de-dupe with merely adequate performance were staggering if I wanted to have plenty of spare block cache left over for improving performance overall.

Sun left some of the FOSS operating systems a poison pill with its CDDL licence, which is the main reason why the implementations of zfs on Linux are immature and is being "re-implemented" with US DOE sponsorship, ostensibly in a GNU compatible licence.

zfs reminds me a great deal of TIFF - lots of great ideas in the "White Paper", but an elusive (or very very costly) white elephant to acquire.  "Rapidly changing", "bleeding edge", and "hot & new" are not descriptors for filesystems I want to trust more than a token amount of data to.

=R=