Nicolas Ross wrote:
That depends largely on how big your operations are. I cannot remember
what the defaults are, but they are reasonable. In general, big
journals can help if you do big I/O operations. In practice, block
group sizes can be more important for performance (bigger can help on
very large file systems or big files).
The volume will be composed of 7 1TB disk in raid5, so 6 TB.
Be careful with that arrangement. You are right up against the ragged
edge in terms of data safety.
1TB disks a consumer grade SATA disks with non-recoverable error rates
of about 10^-14. That is one non-recoverable error per 11TB.
Now consider what happens when one of your disks fails. You have to read
6TB to reconstruct the failed disk. With error rate of 1 in 11TB, the
chances of another failure occurring in 6TB of reads is about 53%. So
the chances are that during this operation, you are going to have
another failure, and the chances are that your RAID layer will kick the
disk out as faulty - at which point you will find yourself with 2 failed
disks in a RAID5 array and in need of a day or two of downtime to scrub
your data to a fresh array and hope for the best.
RAID5 is ill suited to arrays over 5TB. Using enterprise grade disks
will gain you an improved error rate (10^-15), which makes it good
enough - if you also have regular backups. But enterprise grade disks
are much smaller and much more expensive.
Not to mention that your performance on small writes (smaller than the
stripe width) will be appalling with RAID5 due to the write-read-write
operation required to construct the parity which will reduce your
effective performance to that of a single disk.
It will
host many, many small files, and some biger files. But the files that
change the most often will mos likely be smaller than the blocsize.
That sounds like a scenario from hell for RAID5 (or RAID6).
The
gfs will not be used for io-intensive tasks, that's where the standalone
volumes comes into play. It'll be used to access many files, often.
Specificly, apache will run from it, with document root, session store,
etc on the gfs.
Performance-wise, GFS should should be OK for that if you are running
with noatime and the operations are all reads. If you end up with write
contention without partitioning the access to directory subtrees on a
per server basis, the performance will fall off a cliff pretty quickly.
Gordan
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