Originally posted by starshipeleven
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Is ZFS's ARC cache really superior in any way compared to classical Linux block cache used by regular Linux filesystems?
My assumption regarding ZFS's ARC cache was that it got integrated into ZFS because that made sense on Solaris.
Then when porting the code to Linux that caching layer was just too hard to refactor out of ZFS (in order to switch to using the regular Linux block cache), so they kept the ARC cache in the codebase.
In some cases ARC leads to worse resource utilization: memory mapped files end up being cached in both caches (thus wasting 2x RAM for no extra effect).
Nevertheless, ZFS is known to perform very well on machines with lots of memory.
Can somebody with more technical knowledge correct me if I'm wrong?
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