Solaris ZFS Administration Guide

The recordsize Property

Specifies a suggested block size for files in the file system.

This property is designed solely for use with database workloads that access files in fixed-size records. ZFS automatically adjust block sizes according to internal algorithms optimized for typical access patterns. For databases that create very large files but access the files in small random chunks, these algorithms may be suboptimal. Specifying a recordsize greater than or equal to the record size of the database can result in significant performance gains. Use of this property for general purpose file systems is strongly discouraged, and may adversely affect performance. The size specified must be a power of two greater than or equal to 512 and less than or equal to 128 Kbytes. Changing the file system's recordsize only affects files created afterward. Existing files are unaffected.

This property can also be referred to by its shortened column name, recsize.