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And what you experienced has nothing to do with the HFS+ file system at all. We're talking about ZFS and the memory used to improve performance. It is a known side effect of the file system design - ZFS was never designed to be used in an environment where memory is at a premium.



UFS was a walking disaster area when one considers the litany of issues people had with it. Apple is eventually going to replace it with something that will scale from embedded to servers so that they don't have to have duplication and thus unneeded extra cost. HAMMER will do what you need - are there features missing? of course but HAMMER is in continuous development with the short comings being addressed.

Unlike ZFS, HAMMER provides everything plus a lower memory foot print - I'd say that is a pretty good alternative to ZFS.

And what you experienced has nothing to do with the HFS+ file system at all. We're talking about ZFS and the memory used to improve performance. It is a known side effect of the file system design - ZFS was never designed to be used in an environment where memory is at a premium. "

Of course not. Why would you think that I connect OSX memory usage with HFS+ ? My point is that leopard as deployed on desktop class platforms is _already_ a memory hog in my experience. Thus it's hard for me to speculate on ZFS not making the cut because it _might_ be a memory hog on OSX.

Why should a next gen apple FS be required to span all platforms? This is as likely as not to lead to undesirable compromises on both ends, even if it is cheaper. I say horses for courses. (do we buy apple products because they are cheap or cheap to design? does apple pass cheap design costs on to us?).



UFS was a walking disaster area when one considers the litany of issues people had with it. Apple is eventually going to replace it with something that will scale from embedded to servers so that they don't have to have duplication and thus unneeded extra cost. HAMMER will do what you need - are there features missing? of course but HAMMER is in continuous development with the short comings being addressed.

Unlike ZFS, HAMMER provides everything plus a lower memory foot print - I'd say that is a pretty good alternative to ZFS. "

Hammer might be great on OS X except for the fact that it does not currently exist on OS X. I wouldn't bet on that changing either, but would be pleased to be proven wrong.

I'm pretty sure that HAMMER doesn't give you writeable snapshots, which ZFS does - that feature could be very useful for some purposes. For people who just want free or cheap read-only snapshots, HAMMER should satisfy, feature-wise.

Interestingly Matt Dillon (DragonflyBSD lead developer) was considering ZFS for a while but decided it didn't solve the problems he was interested in (he wants to do single system image clustering, i.e. tying a cluster together into a single logical unix system. HAMMER is designed to accommodate that goal in some way).