Roch Bourbonnais at Kernel Performance Engineering, Sun Microsystems reckons ZFS is not quite ready for the prime time. The result shows an increasing better performance on each ZFS build and is not far from a super tuned UFS.
To achieve acceptable performance levels:
The latest ZFS code base. ZFS improves fast these days. We will need to keep tracking releases for a little while. The current OpenSolaris release as well as the upcoming Solaris 10 Update 3 (this fall), should perform for these tests, as well as the Build 44 results shown here.
UFS/DIO : 100 %
UFS : xx no directio (to be updated)
ZFS Best : 75% best tuned config with latest bits.
ZFS S10U2 : 50% best tuned config.
ZFS S10U2 : 25% simple tuning.
UFS (with DIO) has been heavily tuned over the years to provide very good support for DBMS. We are just beginning to explore the tweaks and tunings necessary to achieve comparable performance from ZFS in this specialized domain. We knew that running a DBMS would be a challenge since, a database tickles filesystems in ways that are quite different from other types of loads.