Are there performance benefits to turning off archivelogging? Is it wise?
The normal answer is: "Use archivelog mode". Unless you are taking cold backups you will not be able to recover from them without the log files archived during the backup.

If you are taking hourly cold backups and are running in noarchivelog mode, you risk losing an hours worth of committed transactions (which you don't mind). The purpose of archiving the logs is so that you can recover all (or nearly all) of the committed transactions after a media failure.

Whichever mode you choose Oracle still writes logs to the online redo log files - in archivelog mode you enable the archiving of those files as they fill up. 

Performance benefits will not normally be significant - here is a list of special cases where there is a difference in redo generation.



Seeing as your 'backups' are ZFS snapshots, you do not need log files for restoring the database - reverting to a snapshot will be similar to recovery after a power loss and will use the snapshotted online redo logs to roll forward to a consistent state. In that specific case, and seeing that you do not mind losing recent data, noarchivelog mode may be acceptable to you.

Not having the standby will still increase your recovery time in the case of hardware failure on the primary however - you may wish to consider that.