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Are you, sir, suggesting that I lack real world experience? Well I never...!!

But seriously, there are a few points here which are worth responding to; a careful eye picks out some of the things I could have talked about, but cut to avoid the problem of too many themes in one article:

This is true, but frankly I find it unimportant in the last year or so since most of the ZFS features I consider important are in mainline Solaris, since, say, U4. A lot of the dev stuff is either icing, like gzip compression, or far-off alpha stuff, like on-disk encryption.



Sure. I, personally, would never recommend that anyone runs a dev version of an OS in a commercial setting. It's rarely worth the hassle.



I did allude to this. But I am not sure that that Seltzer paper is an applicable reference because I don't think that the designs of ZFS and LFS are close enough, ie, ZFS is not a pure-play log structured FS and requires no cleaner. I am not even sure the FFS comparison stands because journaling changes a lot, performance wise.

Still, the kernel of the argument is probably that ZFS and LFS both often change sequential IO to random and vice-versa, and this can cause weird performance characteristics. I think that this is true. However, experience (!) has taught me that single disk performance is rarely important, for the simple reason that almost any modern FS can max out a single disk on sequential and random. Putting it another way, if you require performance, you probably need more disks.