There were legitimate bugs in ZFS that we hit. Mostly around ZIL/SLOG and L2ARC and the umpteen million knobs that one can tweak.
You can do the same with just about any file system. In the Windows world you can blow your feet off with NTFS configuration too.
Of course there have been bugs, but every filesystem has had data-impacting bugs. Redundancy and backups are a critical caveat for all file systems for a reason. I once heard it said that “you can always afford to lose the data you don’t have backed up”. I do not think that broadly applies (such as with individuals), but it certainly applies in most business contexts.
Obviously there's footguns in everything. Filesystem ones are just especially impactful.
But a lot of people out there will slap a bunch of USB 2.0 hard drives on top of an old gaming computer. I’m all for experimenting, and I sympathize that it’s expensive to run ZFS on “ZFS class” platforms and hardware. I don’t begrudge others that.
It would be really nice if there was something like ZFS that was a tad more flexibility and right in the kernel with consistent and concise user space tooling. Not everyone is comfortable with DKMS.
Can you provide some specifics? So far all I see is vague complains with no substance, and when complainers are lightly pressed they go defensive.
I did live specific situations over several years in a support engineer role where a double digit percentage of customers in enterprise configurations that ended up somewhere between terrible performance and catastrophic data loss due to the misunderstood configuration of a very complex piece of software.
If you wanna use ZFS, use ZFS. I'm not the internets crusader against it. I have no doubt there's thousands of PB out there of perfectly happy, well configured and healthy zpools. It has some truely next-gen features that are extremely useful. I've just seen it recommended so, so many times as a panacea when something simpler would be just as safe and long lasting.
It's kinda like using Kubernetes to run a few containers. Right?
I see.
> I did live specific situations over several years in a support engineer role where a double digit percentage of customers in enterprise configurations that ended up somewhere between terrible performance and catastrophic data loss due to the misunderstood configuration of a very complex piece of software.
I'm sorry, but this claim is outright unbelievable. If the project was even half as unstable as you claim to be, no one would ever use it in production at all. Either you are leaving out critical details such as non-standard patches and usages that have no relationship with real world usage, or you are fabricating tales.
Also, it's telling that no one stepped forward to offer any concrete details and specifics on these hypothetical issues. Makes you think.
