Gluster users - Sep 2011 - Reading directly from brick

Hi,

I'm new to the list. Apologies if this has been asked and answered
before, my search didn't unearth it.

We're running GlusterFS 3.2.1 on a 2-server load-balanced web-hosting
cluster, to replicate web-uploaded files between the two web servers.
We're using nginx.

We're about to move a Drupal site to this cluster that uses the Boost
static file cache. This file cache needs to be replicated. I've heard
that reads from glusterfs are around 20 times slower than from ext3:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/61908#comment-193143 . This post
suggests a workaround of doing reads directly from the local brick. Is
this a safe thing to do: do reads from the brick and writes to the
glusterfs volume?

Thanks,

Dave

Hi Dave - welcome to Gluster.

Simple answer - no, it's not ever safe to do writes to an active Gluster
backend.

As for reads - 20 times slower sounds like a bit of an exaggeration - that's
probably a worst case with an incorrectly or inefficiently configured back end.

James Burnash
Unix Engineer
Knight Capital Group


-----Original Message-----
From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at
gluster.org] On Behalf Of Dave Jenkins
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 12:17 PM
To: gluster-users at gluster.org
Subject: [Gluster-users] Reading directly from brick

Hi,

I'm new to the list. Apologies if this has been asked and answered before,
my search didn't unearth it.

We're running GlusterFS 3.2.1 on a 2-server load-balanced web-hosting
cluster, to replicate web-uploaded files between the two web servers.
We're using nginx.

We're about to move a Drupal site to this cluster that uses the Boost static
file cache. This file cache needs to be replicated. I've heard that reads
from glusterfs are around 20 times slower than from ext3:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/61908#comment-193143 . This post suggests a
workaround of doing reads directly from the local brick. Is this a safe thing to
do: do reads from the brick and writes to the glusterfs volume?

Thanks,

Dave
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