Gluster users - Oct 2011 - tons and tons of clients, oh my!

Hello gluster-verse!

I'm about to see if GlusterFS can handle a large amount of clients, this was
not at all in plans when we initially selected and setup our current
configuration.

What sort of experience do you (the collective "you" as in y'all)
have with a large  client to storage brick server ratio? (~1330:1) Where do you
see things going awnry?

Most of this will be reads and locks on small files and dirs. our setup is
3xstorage node servers in a pure distribute config.

-luis
P.S. Yes I am a little nuts.

Luis E. Cerezo

http://www.luiscerezo.org
http://twitter.com/luiscerezo
http://flickr.com/photos/luiscerezo
Voice: 412 223 7396
Photo web store
http://photos.luiscerezo.org


gluster 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://supercolony.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20111020/10dfcd1e/attachment.html>

On 10/20/2011 06:29 PM, Luis Cerezo wrote:
> Hello gluster-verse!
>
> I'm about to see if GlusterFS can handle a large amount of clients,
this
> was not at all in plans when we initially selected and setup our current
> configuration.
>
> What sort of experience do you (the collective "you" as in
y'all) have
> with a large client to storage brick server ratio? (~1330:1) Where do
> you see things going awnry?
We've had up to 300 clients per brick ratios in the past.  For large 
files, we saw lots of contention.  Contention drastically reduces 
performance.
> Most of this will be reads and locks on small files and dirs. our setup
> is 3xstorage node servers in a pure distribute config.
You do not want to even consider small files ... this is not a good use 
case for a cluster file system in general.  The only real way to deal 
with this is to put your backing file system on SSD or Flash, and have a 
very fast network.  Even then performance is not going to be that good.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
        http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615