Which OS for farming?

[chrisfostertv]

@asdf

Is there one OS that would be particularly advantageous?

Keep an eye on FreeBSD, Niall who is a cored dev here is very keen on it ;):

@ned14

One of the big reasons I did the port of the MaidSafe codebase to FreeBSD was to avail of ZFS. Our storage layer is actually currently very, very simple, it literally stores chunks as files by opening a new file and blatting the chunk into it, similarly to read chunks we currently open a handle to it and blat the chunk into memory. We don’t, currently, even use memory mapped i/o, we just use the standard iostreams file i/o built into the C++ standard library.

As a result, with the present extremely naive storage layer there is no concept of storage tiering, or anything fancy at all. You basically need a local not distributed filing system, and that’s it. As a result, performance is heavily influenced by what a single non-tiered filing system can deliver. And of all the local not distributed filing systems presently available, the clear performance leader is ZFS which can provide truly astonishing synchronous write performance (i.e. write a chunk and fsync it, this murders most filing systems) plus it makes very good use of any RAM you feed it as a read cache, it’s far far far better at this than ext4 or NTFS, and it self heals bitrot which means the SAFE network won’t penalise your node for serving corrupted chunks.

Hence it is my guess that for those looking into big iron farming, the sole choice of OS will be FreeBSD and the sole choice of storage will be ZFS paired with a fast SSD write intent log device. Hence me doing the port to FreeBSD 10 where we now regularly CI test to ensure we don’t break things.

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@ned14

My current best guess as to ideal dedicated hardware for farming:

Hardware on the FreeBSD supported hardware list (Release Information | The FreeBSD Project)

A low end Haswell or later CPU, preferably with ECC RAM support. These have really excellent idle power consumption, if you don’t care about power consumption then Ivy or Sandy Bridge CPUs are fine. Note that FreeBSD currently has poor support for Haswell CPUs.

As fast and low latency a network connection as you can afford.
Running FreeBSD 10 64 bit or later.

ZFS as the filing system (ZFS - Wikipedia) with 4k alignment during config.

As many hard drives as you can afford for the main ZFS backing. Ideally mirrored so they can self heal bit rot, but not strictly necessary.

A small but fast SSD as the ZFS log intent device. This makes synchronous (fsynced) writes very fast. You don’t need it bigger than the largest amount of synchronously written data to occur at once, so even a 16Gb SSD is probably way overkill.

Make sure you only allocate half of the device to the intent log leaving the other half trimmed empty, ZFS does a ton of writing and will wear out a SSD quickly if you give it the full device.

As much (preferably ECC) RAM as you can afford for read caching by ZFS. 32Gb is probably enough. Some like to add another SSD for this, you can if you want.

That is probably a good best estimate for ideal dedicated farming hardware in terms of balancing power consumption, earnings and cost. I hope that helps.