Testing Native ZFS Encryption Speed
Summary
For this purpose I decided to go with the Ubuntu Server (to minimize impact desktop environment might have) inside of the 2 CPU Virtual Machine with 24 GB of RAM. Two CPUs should be enough to show any multithreading performance difference while 24 GB of RAM is there to give home to our ZFS disks. For the testing purpose I only care about the relative speed difference and using the RAM instead of the real disks would give more repeatable results. Data disks are just bunch of zeros (3 GB each) and the (RAID-Z2) ZFS pool has the usual stuff but with compression turned off and sync set to always in order to minimize their impact on the results. Leaving metadata unencrypted does leak a bit of (meta)data but it also enables send/receive without either side even being decrypted – just ideal for a backup box in the untrusted environment.