Performance

Status

Currently OpenZFS on OSX is under heavy development, with priority being given to completion of features over performance.

Current Benchmarks

In order to establish a baseline of current performance of OpenZFS on OSX, measurements have been made using the iozone [1] benchmarking tool. The benchmark consists of running various ZFS implementations inside a VMware 6.0.2 VM on a 2011 iMac. Each VM is provisioned with 8GB of RAM, an OS boot drive, and a 5 GB second HDD containing a ZFS dataset. The HDDs are standard VMware .vmx files.

zpool create -o ashift=12 -f tank <disk device name>

The benchmark consists of the following steps:

1. Start the VM.
2. Import the tank dataset
3. mkdir /tank/tmp && cd /tank/tmp
4. time iozone -a
5. time iozone -a
6. Terminate the VM and VMware before moving to the next ZFS implementation/OS combination.

The results are as follows:

Comparision of ZFS implementations