We have a SunFire X4500 running Solaris 10U5 which does about 5-8k nfs ops of which about 90% are meta data. In hind sight it would have been significantly better to use a mirrored configuration but we opted for 4 x (9+2) raidz2 at the time. We can not take the downtime necessary to change the zpool configuration. We need to improve the meta data performance with little to no money. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there such a thing as a Sun supported NVRAM PCI-X card compatible with the X4500 which can be used as an L2ARC? Thanks, Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100218/7a55cff5/attachment.html>
On 18 February, 2010 - Chris Banal sent me these 1,8K bytes:> We have a SunFire X4500 running Solaris 10U5 which does about 5-8k nfs ops > of which about 90% are meta data. In hind sight it would have been > significantly better to use a mirrored configuration but we opted for 4 x > (9+2) raidz2 at the time. We can not take the downtime necessary to change > the zpool configuration. > > We need to improve the meta data performance with little to no money. Does > anyone have any suggestions? Is there such a thing as a Sun supported NVRAM > PCI-X card compatible with the X4500 which can be used as an L2ARC?See if it helps sticking a few cheap USB sticks in there, and set secondarycache=metadata.. For instance Kingston DT Slim Mini are not that bad performers and cost close to nothing. I''ve got two in a server here, and reading random 4k blocks they do 1500 iops each which is probably more than your current disks. Or if you can stick an Intel X25-M/E in there through SATA/SAS. You can add/remove L2ARCs at will and they don''t need to be 100% reliable either, so if you add several of them they will be raid0''d for performance. /Tomas -- Tomas ?gren, stric at acc.umu.se, http://www.acc.umu.se/~stric/ |- Student at Computing Science, University of Ume? `- Sysadmin at {cs,acc}.umu.se
Try an inexpensive MLC SSD (Intel/Micron) for L2ARC. Won''t help metadat updates, but should boost reads. Regards, Andrey On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Chris Banal <cbanal at gmail.com> wrote:> We have a SunFire X4500 running Solaris 10U5 which does about 5-8k nfs ops > of which about 90% are meta data. In hind sight it would have been > significantly better? to use a mirrored configuration but we opted for 4 x > (9+2) raidz2 at the time. We can not take the downtime necessary to change > the zpool configuration. > > We need to improve the meta data performance with little to no money. Does > anyone have any suggestions? Is there such a thing as a Sun supported NVRAM > PCI-X card compatible with the X4500 which can be used as an L2ARC? > > Thanks, > Chris > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > >
Chris Banal <cbanal at gmail.com> writes:> We have a SunFire X4500 running Solaris 10U5 which does about 5-8k nfs > ops of which about 90% are meta data. In hind sight it would have been > significantly better? to use a mirrored configuration but we opted for > 4 x (9+2) raidz2 at the time. We can not take the downtime necessary > to change the zpool configuration. > > We need to improve the meta data performance with little to no > money. Does anyone have any suggestions?I believe the latest Solaris update will improve metadata caching. always good to be up-to-date on patches, no?> Is there such a thing as a Sun supported NVRAM PCI-X card compatible > with the X4500 which can be used as an L2ARC?I think they only have PCIe, and it hardly qualifies as "little to no money". http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f20/specs.xml I''ll second the recommendations for Intel X25-M for L2ARC if you can spare a SATA slot for it. -- Kjetil T. Homme Redpill Linpro AS - Changing the game