Gluster users - Jul 2011 - performance expectations?

Hello,

I'm keen to use glusterfs as scalable storage to match the rest of my 
horizontally-scalable, commodity platform.

I've been testing on a machine with 4x SATA 7200 drives. I created four 
KVM virtual machines, gave each of them a dedicated disk, and installed 
gluster-3.2.2. I created a distributed replicated volume across four 
bricks, with a replication factor of 2. The virtual machines are 
networked together via software bridge (standard KVM).

When transferring a 4GB filesystem of relatively small files 
(mean=795KB), I see write throughput of about 512 KB/s, with reads 
approaching 3 MB/s.

As expected, large files show much better throughput: 20MB/s write and 
50MB/s read for a 500MB file.

In production, I plan to swap out magnetic drives for SSDs. Will this 
help with the write performance of small files on glusterfs, as I suspect?

Are my results for small files consistent with other users?


Cheers,


-C-

See bug# 2869 . It looks like there is lot of context switching that
occurs when small files are involved since with small files you are
doing more system calls. Feel free to ask for update on that bug. I
haven't got any yet.

Have you tried using Raid Controller with Cache?

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Chris Haumesser <ch at luciddg.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm keen to use glusterfs as scalable storage to match the rest of my
> horizontally-scalable, commodity platform.
>
> I've been testing on a machine with 4x SATA 7200 drives. I created four
KVM
> virtual machines, gave each of them a dedicated disk, and installed
> gluster-3.2.2. I created a distributed replicated volume across four
bricks,
> with a replication factor of 2. The virtual machines are networked together
> via software bridge (standard KVM).
>
> When transferring a 4GB filesystem of relatively small files (mean=795KB),
I
> see write throughput of about 512 KB/s, with reads approaching 3 MB/s.
>
> As expected, large files show much better throughput: 20MB/s write and
> 50MB/s read for a 500MB file.
>
> In production, I plan to swap out magnetic drives for SSDs. Will this help
> with the write performance of small files on glusterfs, as I suspect?
>
> Are my results for small files consistent with other users?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> -C-
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>