We recently built a new server for our Production database. The machine is top of the line with 128GB of RAM, dual E5-2650. We also included NVME drives for ZIL and L2ARC. Currently we have 3 zpools. First one holds the FreeBSD install. Second holds the jails, and third holds all of the database data. Needless to say it's fast.
FWIW I did not find having a ZIL beneficial for my workload on a similarly huge servers, also running FreeBSD 10. I do have the L2ARC on the SSD, but the size of my data set usually leaves the ARC as sufficient to handle almost all requests. That is, the L2ARC is mostly empty most of the time (or at least never gets re-fetched from).
With my dataset I have been able to take advantage of the L2ARC. Currently using about 80GB on ARC and 260GB on L2ARC. With the ARC currently having the greater Hit ratio.
ARC Size: 66.77% 82.41 GiB
Target Size: (Adaptive) 66.79% 82.44 GiB
Min Size (Hard Limit): 12.50% 15.43 GiB
Max Size (High Water): 8:1 123.44 GiB
ARC Efficiency: 424.85m
Cache Hit Ratio: 97.39% 413.76m
Cache Miss Ratio: 2.61% 11.09m
Actual Hit Ratio: 93.08% 395.43m
L2 ARC Size: (Adaptive) 264.37 GiB
Header Size: 0.18% 485.87 MiB
L2 ARC Breakdown: 11.09m
Hit Ratio: 7.13% 790.96k
Miss Ratio: 92.87% 10.30m
Feeds: 122.76k
I'd start by testing the speed of the driver running the NVME drive. Does it show up as a normal drive in FreeBSD? I've only ever used regular Intel SSDs. I don't know if NVME devices connect differently. I hear if you ask very nicely to the right people you can get special drivers for some fancy PCI-e based "drives" which make them really fast.
Both SSDs are the same part for the ZIL and L2ARC. I am currently testing some of our most heavy procedures with ZIL enabled and with ZIL disabled.
