this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
99 points (91.6% liked)

Selfhosted

46654 readers
429 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
99
Tell me why I shouldn't use btrfs (lemmy.zip)
submitted 5 months ago by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
114 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn't be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can't downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn't go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Meh. I run proxmox and other boot drives on ext4, data drives on xfs. I don't have any need for additional features in btrfs. Shrinking would be nice, so maybe someday I'll use ext4 for data too.

I started with zfs instead of RAID, but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it, whereas I could just configure RAID 10 once and be done with it. The performance differences are insignificant, since most of the work it does happens in the background.

You can benchmark them if you care about performance. You can find plenty of discussion by googling "ext vs xfs vs btrfs" or whichever ones you're considering. They haven't changed that much in the past few years.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it,

I spent none, and it works fine. what was your issue?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have four 6tb data drives and 32gb of RAM. When I set them up with zfs, it claimed quite a few gb of RAM for its cache. I tried allocating some of the other NVMe drive as cache, and tried to reduce RAM usage to reasonable levels, but like I said, I found that I was spending a lot of time fiddling instead of just configuring RAID and have it running just fine in much less time.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can ignore the RAM usage, it's just cache. It uses up to half your RAM by default but if other things need it zfs will just clear RAM for that to happen.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

That might be what was supposed to happen, but when I started up the VMs I saw memory contention.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Proxmox only supports btrfs or ZFS for raid

Or at least that's what I thought

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

ext4 and others too.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Do you rely on snapshotting and journaling? If so backup your snapshots.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Lem453@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Btrfs only has issues with raid 5. Works well for raid 1 and 0. No reason to change if it works for you

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 5 months ago

I think it has more issues than just with raid 5 &6!

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago

It is stable with raid 0,1 and 10.

Raid 5 and 6 are dangerous

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

For my jbod array, I use ext4 on gpt partitions. Fast efficient mature.

For anything else I use ext4 on lvm thinpools.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I am using btrfs on raid1 for a few years now and no major issue.

It's a bit annoying that a system with a degraded raid doesn't boot up without manual intervention though.

Also, not sure why but I recently broke a system installation on btrfs by taking out the drive and accessing it (and writing to it) from another PC via an USB adapter. But I guess that is not a common scenario.

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 5 months ago

The whole point of RAID redundancy is uptime. The fact that btrfs doesn't boot with a degraded disk is utterly ridiculous and speaks volumes of the developers.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›