One more addition to this release is * errno compatibility: This will enable a process to see the proper errnos in cases of cross OS server/client setups. Regards, Amar On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Amar S. Tumballi <amar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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! -- Amar Tumballi Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker [bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org] http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!
