The Hidden Value of CPU-Intensive Compression on Modern Hardware

[Umair Khurshid]

Original article here.
Consider this when replying.

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[Espionage724]

Compression in the storage stack is usually treated with quiet suspicion, and it is assumed that compression is an expensive luxury that consumes CPU cycles needed elsewhere.

This idea rests on a particular hierarchy of constraints in which the processor is scarce and I/O is comparatively expensive but secondary.

I go with that, but figure my drive is faster than my CPU. I have i5-8400H (8th-gen Coffeelake) and a x4 Gen3 NVMe, and on Linux with initramfs I had fastest times with no compression (others were comparable/real-world the same though with notably smaller sizes)

 

[cracauer@]

What I want is client-side compression in NFS.

Bit tricky since you also make it visible on the server.

 

[Mjölnir]

For me, the biggest benefit is the reduced RAM usage of ZFS by using a compressed ARC, and a compressed L2ARC saves precious storage space on more expensive NVRAM storage devices, resp.. Effectively, this reduces ARC & L2ARC size by a factor of about 2 for executables/binaries. Thus the machine has more resources for services, VMs etc.pp.