Any news on the schedule for the live config change (add/remove volumes without having to restart glusterfs)? Amar S. Tumballi wrote: > 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 at zresearch.com> 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! >> > > > > >
