Gluster users - Oct 2010 - Way to improve GlusterFS performance for serving rails applications?

I am testing GlusterFS for hosting Rails web applications but the performance 
is incredibly poor. 

I installed GLusterFS 3.1 in two servers (Ubuntu 10.10 LTS 64 bit)  with 1TB 
disk each formated with ext4. Then created a replicated volume:

sudo gluster volume create opt replica 2 transport tcp host1:/opt host2:/opt

then mounted the volume using the GlusterFS client on my web app server that 
contains my rails applications:

host1:/opt /opt glusterfs defaults,_netdev 0 0 # in /etc/fstab
mount -a

The problem is that if I run any rails application when stored in the gluster 
volume it take minutes to start and then each page load take 5~10 secs. If 
instead I run the rails app from the local hard disk in the same machine it 
goes fast as thunder.

To give an idea here is some output from rails log file:

# Using gluster to store the rails application takes 5.6 secs to render a page
Completed in 5645ms (View: 2948, DB: 46) | 200 OK 

# Using local storage it take 400ms to render the same page
Completed in 401ms (View: 296, DB: 34) | 200 OK

All machines (both storage and rails app) are connected to the same switch via 
1GB ethernet and there is no other traffic in that switch (is isolated).

The questions:

Am I doing something wrong or missing something or is this expected?

Are there any options I can set when mounting the partition to improve 
performance? 

Are there any options I can use when creating the volume to improve 
performance?

-- 

regards,
Horacio Sanson

On 10/29/2010 12:23 PM, Horacio Sanson wrote:
> The problem is that if I run any rails application when stored in the
gluster
> volume it take minutes to start and then each page load take 5~10 secs. If
> instead I run the rails app from the local hard disk in the same machine it
> goes fast as thunder.
This sounds like a locking or a stat issue ... though there could be 
something else going on.
>
> To give an idea here is some output from rails log file:
>
> # Using gluster to store the rails application takes 5.6 secs to render a
page
> Completed in 5645ms (View: 2948, DB: 46) | 200 OK
>
> # Using local storage it take 400ms to render the same page
> Completed in 401ms (View: 296, DB: 34) | 200 OK
>
> All machines (both storage and rails app) are connected to the same switch
via
> 1GB ethernet and there is no other traffic in that switch (is isolated).
>
> The questions:
>
> Am I doing something wrong or missing something or is this expected?
>
> Are there any options I can set when mounting the partition to improve
> performance?
What do your client configs look like?



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Am 29.10.2010 18:23, schrieb Horacio Sanson:

[ ... rails via gluster mount ....]

Hi Horacio,
> The questions:
>
> Am I doing something wrong or missing something or is this expected?
I don't think you are doing something wrong. We tried the same (serving 
rails apps off of gluster mounts) and performance was terrible. Since 
there is no lock manager in gluster, the gluster client needs to check 
all server nodes when the file is accessed locally. This kills 
performance with many small files.

cheers
  Paul

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