Hi, As the topic says, I want to give you all a snapshot of whats coming in 1.4.x series and where is our main focus for the release. 1.4.x - * Performance of GlusterFS (reduced CPU and memory usage, protocol enhancements) * Non blocking I/O - to give more responsiveness to GlusterFS, remove the issues faced due to timeout, freezing etc. * Few features to handle different verticals of storage requirements. The tarballs will be available from - http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/1.4-qa/ Advised to use only latest tarballs in directory, and Report bugs through Savannah Bug tracking system only, so its easier for us to track them. You can shift to 'glusterfs--mainline--3.0' branch (from which glusterfs -1.4.0qa releases are made) if you want to try the latest fixes. Though none of these are not yet advised for production usage. That was a higher level description of what is coming. Here are exact module/translator wise description of whats inside the tarball for you. * nbio - (non-blocking I/O) This feature comes with significant/drastic changes in transport layer. Lot of drastic changes to improve the responsiveness of server and to handle more connections. Designed to scale for higher number of servers/clients. - NOTE that this release of QA has only TCP/IP transport layer supported, work is going on to port it to ib-verbs module. * binary protocol - this reduces the amount of header/protocol data transfered over wire significantly, also reduces the CPU usage as there is no binary to ASCII (and vica-versa) involved at protocol layer. The difference may not be significant for large file performance, but for small files and meta operations this will be phenomenal improvement. * BDB storage translator - Few people want to use lot and lot of small files over large storage volume, but for them the filesystem performance for small files was a main bottleneck. Number of inodes spent, overall kernel overhead in create cycle etc was quite high. With introduction of BDB storage at the backend, we tried to solve this issue. This is aimed at giving tremendous boost for cases where, millions and millions of small files are in a single directory. [NOTE: This is not posix complaint as no file attribute fops are not supported over these files, however file rename and having multiple directory levels, having symlinks is supported]. GlusterFS BDB options here: http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Translators_v1.3#Berkeley_DB Also refer this link - http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/berkeley-db/db/gsg/CXX/dbconfig.html, so you can tune BDB better. We are still investigating the performance numbers for files bigger than page-size, but you can give it a try if your avg file size is well below 100k mark. * libglusterfsclient - A API interface for glusterfs (for file create/write, open/write, open/read cases). Which will merge all these calls in one fop and gives a much better performance by removing the latency caused by lot of calls happening in a single file i/o. (Aimed at small file performance, but users may have to write their own apps using libglusterfs client. Check this tool - http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/misc/glfs-bm.c You need to compile this like ' # gcc -lglusterfsclient -o glfs-bm glfs-bm.c' * mod_glusterfs: Aimed at solving the problem web hosting companies have. We embedded glusterfs into apache-1.3.x, lighttpd-1.4.x, lighttpd-1.5, (and work going on for apache-2.0). By doing this, we could save the context switch overhead which was significant if web servers were using glusterfs mountpoint as document root. So, now, the web servers itself can be cluster filesystem aware hence they see much bigger storage system well within their space. For Apache 1.3 - http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Getting_modglusterfs_to_work For Lighttpd - http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Mod_glusterfs_for_lighttpd * improvement to io-cache to handle mod-glusterfs better. Other significant work going on parallel to these things are: * work towards proper input validation and abort in the cases where any memory corruption is seen. * work towards reducing the overhead caused by runtime memory allocations and free. * work on reducing the string based operations in the code base, which reduces the CPU usage. * log msgs improvement (reduce the log amount, make log rotate work seemlessly). * strict check in init() time, so the mounting itself wont happen if some config is not valid. (To get the points mentioned in 'Best Practices' page into the codebase itself). * Make sure the port on other OSes work fine. We expect to get this branch to stability very soon (within a month or so), so we won't be having complains about small file performance and timeout/hang issues anymore (from 1.3.x branch). Hence your help in testing this out for your application, your configuration, and reporting bugs would help us to get it to stability even faster. Regards, GlusterFS Team PS: Currently this release of qa is not tested on any other OS than GNU/Linux. I will write back as soon as we have a fix for each specific OS. Regards, Amar -- Amar Tumballi Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker [bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org] http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!
