SSD: TRIM yes or no / SWAP yes or no ?

Sergei_Shablovsky

Dear pfSense Gurus!

What is FreeBSD’s better settings for pfSense+ (10Gb total ingress/egress) on bare metal server with hardware RAID10 (2 x RAID1 in 1 stripe RAID0):

TRIM yes or no;
SWAP yes or no;
?

And how impact turning on “Read Ahead” and “Turn Off Drive Cache” options in the hardware RAID controller in this case of using SSDs:
is the cache on RAID controller speed up a little bit access to SSDs, or make only drawbacks because of concurrecy&chaos between SSD’s FreeBSD 14/15 driver for ZFS and SSDs logic, SSD’s internal controller logic and hardware RAID’s controller logic?

Search on this user forum give only 18 (!) results and most of them are from 2015-2018 years!
Totally madness and archaic! Because SSD already used in high-loading more than 10 years!!!

Thank You and have a nice day!

P.S.
Is the useful for fresh pfSense+ 2.8.0 making a separate file system (and pool, if using ZFS) to isolate the logs, just so full logs could not compromise the operating system.?

stephenw10

Trim: yes, SWAP: no IMO.

Sergei_Shablovsky

@stephenw10 said in SSD: TRIM yes or no / SWAP yes or no ?:

Trim: yes, SWAP: no IMO.

What about “Read Ahead” and “Turn Off Drive Cache” in hardware RAID/HBA and separate partition for logs?

stephenw10

A separate partition, or drive, for logs is not supported in pfSense currently. Not in any official/supportable way at least.

Sergei_Shablovsky

@stephenw10 said in SSD: TRIM yes or no / SWAP yes or no ?:

A separate partition, or drive, for logs is not supported in pfSense currently. Not in any official/supportable way at least.

Thank You for answering and patience!

So, not possible in any way, for example:

BEFORE pfSense installation, formatting internal drive as with two(2) separate file systems/pools - one for pfSense FreeBSD, and another one - for logs, and later tuning pfSense/FreeBSD/package settings for properly saving logs;
install main pfSense FreeBSD on one disk by normal way, and later tuning pfSense/FreeBSD/package settings for properly saving logs;

?

What would be drawbacks for each way?

Because from FreeBSD’s perspective, no any restrictions on both ways.

And what is more important,- any future pfSense upgrades/updates (probably) not change the way which FreeBSD system (and it’s additional packets/ports) using to save the logs.

Sergei_Shablovsky

@stephenw10 said in SSD: TRIM yes or no / SWAP yes or no ?:

A separate partition, or drive, for logs is not supported in pfSense currently. Not in any official/supportable way at least.

What about “Read Ahead” and “Turn Off Drive Cache” in hardware RAID/HBA setting ?

stephenw10

The only way this is possible currently is to use the syslogng package. There you can set a location to use for log storage which can be a different drive or partition. If you then set /var as a ram drive system logging does not write to the drive.

BUT.... there is no built in management of different drives in pfSense so you need to use custom scripts to do that. Hence it's not supportable.