Hi Dave - welcome to Gluster. Simple answer - no, it's not ever safe to do writes to an active Gluster backend. As for reads - 20 times slower sounds like a bit of an exaggeration - that's probably a worst case with an incorrectly or inefficiently configured back end. James Burnash Unix Engineer Knight Capital Group -----Original Message----- From: gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org [mailto:gluster-users-bounces at gluster.org] On Behalf Of Dave Jenkins Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 12:17 PM To: gluster-users at gluster.org Subject: Reading directly from brick Hi, I'm new to the list. Apologies if this has been asked and answered before, my search didn't unearth it. We're running GlusterFS 3.2.1 on a 2-server load-balanced web-hosting cluster, to replicate web-uploaded files between the two web servers. We're using nginx. We're about to move a Drupal site to this cluster that uses the Boost static file cache. This file cache needs to be replicated. I've heard that reads from glusterfs are around 20 times slower than from ext3: http://groups.drupal.org/node/61908#comment-193143 . This post suggests a workaround of doing reads directly from the local brick. Is this a safe thing to do: do reads from the brick and writes to the glusterfs volume? Thanks, Dave _______________________________________________ Gluster-users mailing list Gluster-users at gluster.org http://gluster.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users DISCLAIMER: This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this in error, please immediately notify me and permanently delete the original and any copy of any e-mail and any printout thereof. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. NOTICE REGARDING PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY Knight Capital Group may, at its discretion, monitor and review the content of all e-mail communications. http://www.knight.com