Morgan - Zero-Filling a VM

A note for Allan…



Now that DigitalOcean is about to begin charging for snapshot storage, I’m wondering about reducing the size of them and the storage fees … more a curiosity than a concern about cost. Some of my snapshots, while compressed, are larger than the actual data they contain due to free space containing unreferenced data. I’m wondering about creating a file from /dev/zero to occupy all the remaining storage space, and then deleting it, leaving the free space zeroed. This will grow the VM image to capacity, so all the DigitalOcean droplet operations will take the longest, I assume. But RLE compression should result in a smaller snapshot. Are there any operational downsides to doing this with a ZFS-based system? What are your thoughts on this?



As always, thank you for your expertise and support of FreeBSD.



--Morgan