Adding gluster-users list. I think there are a few users out there
running gluster on top of btrfs, so this might benefit a broader audience.
On 04/11/2017 09:10 PM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
About a year ago now, I decided to set up a small storage cluster to
store backups (and partially replace Dropbox for my usage, but that's
a separate story). I ended up using GlusterFS as the clustering
software itself, and BTRFS as the back-end storage.
GlusterFS itself is actually a pretty easy workload as far as cluster
software goes. It does some processing prior to actually storing the
data (a significant amount in fact), but the actual on-device storage
on any given node is pretty simple. You have the full directory
structure for the whole volume, and whatever files happen to be on
that node are located within that tree exactly like they are in the
GlusterFS volume. Beyond the basic data, gluster only stores 2-4
xattrs per-file (which are used to track synchronization, and also for
it's internal data scrubbing), and a directory called .glusterfs in
the top of the back-end storage location for the volume which contains
the data required to figure out which node a file is on. Overall, the
access patterns mostly mirror whatever is using the Gluster volume, or
are reduced to slow streaming writes (when writing files and the
back-end nodes are computationally limited instead of I/O limited),
with the addition of some serious metadata operations in the
.glusterfs directory (lots of stat calls there, together with large
numbers of small files).
As far as overall performance, BTRFS is actually on par for this usage
with both ext4 and XFS (at least, on my hardware it is), and I
actually see more SSD friendly access patterns when using BTRFS in
this case than any other FS I tried.
After some serious experimentation with various configurations for
this during the past few months, I've noticed a handful of other things:
1. The 'ssd' mount option does not actually improve performance on
these SSD's. To a certain extent, this actually surprised me at
first, but having seen Hans' e-mail and what he found about this
option, it actually makes sense, since erase-blocks on these devices
are 4MB, not 2MB, and the drives have a very good FTL (so they will
aggregate all the little writes properly).
Given this, I'm beginning to wonder if it actually makes sense to not
automatically enable this on mount when dealing with certain types of
storage (for example, most SATA and SAS SSD's have reasonably good
FTL's, so I would expect them to have similar behavior).
Extrapolating further, it might instead make sense to just never
automatically enable this, and expose the value this option is
manipulating as a mount option as there are other circumstances where
setting specific values could improve performance (for example, if
you're on hardware RAID6, setting this to the stripe size would
probably improve performance on many cheaper controllers).
2. Up to a certain point, running a single larger BTRFS volume with
multiple sub-volumes is more computationally efficient than running
multiple smaller BTRFS volumes. More specifically, there is lower
load on the system and lower CPU utilization by BTRFS itself without
much noticeable difference in performance (in my tests it was about
0.5-1% performance difference, YMMV). To a certain extent this makes
some sense, but the turnover point was actually a lot higher than I
expected (with this workload, the turnover point was around half a
terabyte).
I believe this to be a side-effect of how we use per-filesystem
worker-pools. In essence, we can schedule parallel access better when
it's all through the same worker pool than we can when using multiple
worker pools. Having realized this, I think it might be interesting
to see if using a worker-pool per physical device (or at least what
the system sees as a physical device) might make more sense in terms
of performance than our current method of using a pool per-filesystem.
3. On these SSD's, running a single partition in dup mode is actually
marginally more efficient than running 2 partitions in raid1 mode. I
was actually somewhat surprised by this, and I haven't been able to
find a clear explanation as to why (I suspect caching may have
something to do with it, but I'm not 100% certain about that), but
some limited testing with other SSD's seems to indicate that it's the
case for most SSD's, with the difference being smaller on smaller and
faster devices. On a traditional hard disk, it's significantly more
efficient, but that's generally to be expected.
4. Depending on other factors, compression can actually slow you down
pretty significantly. In the particular case I saw this happen (all
cores completely utilized by userspace software), LZO compression
actually caused around 5-10% performance degradation compared to no
compression. This is somewhat obvious once it's explained, but it's
not exactly intuitive and as such it's probably worth documenting in
the man pages that compression won't always make things better. I may
send a patch to add this at some point in the near future.
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