On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, denis wrote:
I was under the impression that installing Red Hat Cluster Suite with
GFS in RHEL5.1 was a "supported" solution, but a colleague informed me
that the GFS version in RHEL5.x is currently a technology preview?!
Your colleague is semi-misinformed.
GFS1 is stable (and has been for years) and available in RHEL5. GFS2 is
tech preview. So if you are deploying a cluster right now, do it with
GFS1. GFS2 is not yet recommended for production use.
Thanks for the information. My follow-up question is whether GFS (1)
tolerates high performance situations (with lots of concurrent writes /
read access / high number of files)?
As much as any other similar system does. If your heavy writes with lots
of files are all in the same directory, then you will get contention and
performance degradation, as writing to a directory (e.g. file creation)
requires a directory lock. Something like Maildir with few user accounts
won't perform brilliantly. Maildir with lots of user accounts, isn't too
bad. There are also tuning parameters you can apply (e.g. lock pruning)
that help in such cases.
The only way you will know for sure is to try it and see for your
particular application. If GFS can't handle it despite optimizations, you
could always try OCFS2 or GlusterFS (please do post back with your
findings if you get that far, I've not seen a decent real-world
comparison recently), but if you are after clusterable scalability, then
your application will likely need to be made/modified in such a way that
it doesn't trip over issues inherent in clustering (and there will be FS
lock contention issues with _ANY_ scaleable cluster FS).
Gordan
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