Hi Jeff thanks for taking the time to reply :) Please see my comments below - Quoting Jeff Sturm <jeff.sturm@xxxxxxxxxx>: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: linux-cluster-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx > > [mailto:linux-cluster-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of > > nick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > > Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 5:19 AM > > To: linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx > > Subject: Directories with >100K files > > > > We have a GFS filesystem mounted over iSCSI. When doing an > > 'ls' on directories with several thousand files it takes > > around 10 minutes to get a response back - > > You don't say how many nodes you have, or anything about your > networking. 4 nodes. Each node has 2 x 1GB NIC's dedicated to iSCSI. Each NIC is on a dedicated iSCSI VLAN on a 1GB switch. The storage is on a Dell MD3000i. > > Some general pointers: > > - A plain "ls" is probably much faster any variant that fetches inode > metatdata, e.g. "ls -l". The latter performs a stat() on each > individual file which in turn triggers locking activity of some sort. > This is known to be slow on GFS1. (I've heard reports that GFS2 is/will > be better.) > > - You want a fast, reliable low-latency network for your cluster. Intel > GigE cards and a fast switch are a good bet. > > - Unless your application needs access times or quota support, mounting > with "noquota,noatime" is a good idea. Maybe also "nodiratime". I have remounted with "noquota,noatime,nodiratime" with no performance increase. > > Can anyone recommend any GFS tunables to help us out here ? > > You could try bumping demote_secs up from its default of 5 minutes. > That'll cause locks to be held longer so they may not need to be > reacquired so often. It won't help with the initial directory listing, > but should help on subsequent invocations. I will investigate demote_secs, thankyou. > In your case, with "ls" taking 8 minutes to run, some locks initially > acuired during execution of the command have already been demoted once > complete. > > > Should we set statfs_fast to 1 ? > > Probably good to set this, regardless. Done. > > > What about glock_purge ? > > Glock_purge helps limit CPU time consumed by gfs_scand when a large > number of unused glocks are present. See > http://people.redhat.com/wcheng/Patches/GFS/readme.gfs_glock_trimming.R4 > . This may make your system run better but I'm not sure it's going to > help with listing your giant directories. > > > Here is the fstab entry for the GFS filesystem: > > /dev/vggfs/lvol00 /apps gfs > > _netdev 1 2 > > Try "noatime,noquota" here. > > Jeff > Here is what I have so far - fstab: noatime,nodiratime,noquota statfs_fast 1 statfs_slots 128 glock_purge 50 directio and inherit_directio set on the files/dirs that are taking a long time to 'ls'. I will continue investigations and get back to the list shortly. Many thanks Nick. -- Linux-cluster mailing list Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
