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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • My point was more that the SSD will likely have lower latency than an Ethernet link in any case, as you’ve got the extra delay of data having to traverse both the local and remote network stack, as well as any switches that may be in the way. Additionally, in order to deal with that bandwidth you’ll need to kit out not only the local machine, but also the remote one with expensive 400GbE hardware+transceivers, plus switches, and in order to actually store something the remote machine will also have to have either a ludicrous amount of RAM (resulting in a setup which is vastly more complex and expensive than the original RAIDed SSDs while offering presumably similar performance) or RAIDed SSD storage (which would put us right back at square one, but with extra latency). Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but I fail to see how this could possibly be set up in a way which outperforms locally attached swap space.





  • What exactly are you referring to? It seems to me to be pretty competitive with both ZFS and btrfs, in terms of supported features. It also has a lot of unique stuff, like being able to set drives/redundancy level/parity level/cache policy (among other things) per-directory or per-file, which I don’t think any of the other mainstream CoW filesystems can do.


  • The recommendation for ECC memory is simply because you can’t be totally sure stuff won’t go corrupt with only the safety measures of a checksummed CoW filesystem; if the data can silently go corrupt in memory the data could still go bad before getting written out to disk or while sitting in the read cache. I wouldn’t really say that’s a downside of those filesystems, rather it’s simply a requirement if you really care about preventing data corruption. Even without ECC memory they’re still far less susceptible to data loss than conventional filesystems.


  • I considered a KVM or something similar, but I still need access to the host machine in parallel (ideally side-by-side so I can step through the code running in the guest from a debugger in my dev environment on the host). I’ve already got a multi-monitor setup, so dedicating one of them to a VM while testing stuff isn’t too much of a big deal - I just have to keep track of whether or not my hands are on separate keyboard+mouse for the guest :)