Hi I would describe our basic use case for gluster as: "data-store for a cold-standby application". A specific application is installed on 2 hardware machines, the data is kept in-sync between the 2 machines by a replica-2 gluster volume. (IOW: "RAID 1") At any one time only 1 machine has the volume mounted and the application running. If the machine goes down the application is started on the remaining machine. IOW at any one point in time there is only ever 1 "reader & writer" running. I profiled a performance problem we have with this application, which unfortunately we can't modify. The profile shows many "opendir/readdirp/releasedir" cycles, the directory in question has about 1000 files and the application "stalls" for several milliseconds any time it decides to do a readdir. The volume is mounted via FUSE and it appears that said operation is not cached at all. To provide a test-case i tried to replicate what the application does. The problematic operation is nearly perfectly emulated just by using "ls .". I created a script that replicates how we use gluster and demonstrates that a FUSE-mount appears to be lacking any caching of readdir. A word about the test-environment: 2 identical servers Dual Socket Xeon CPU E5-2640 v3 (8 cores, 2.60GHz, HT enabled) RAM: 128GB DDR4 ECC (8x16GB) Storage: 2TB Intel P3520 PCIe-NVMe-SSD Network: Gluster: 10GB/s direct connect (no switch), external: 1Gbit/s OS: CentOS 7.7, Installed with "Minimal" ISO, everything: Default Up2Date as of: 2020-01-21 (Kernel: 3.10.0-1062.9.1.el7.x86_64) SELinux: Disabled SSH-Key for 1 -> 2 exchanged Gluster 6.7 packages installed via 'centos-release-gluster6' see attached: gluster-testcase-no-caching-of-dir-operations-for-fuse.sh The meat of the testcase is this: a profile of: ls . vs: ls . . . . . . . . . . (10 dots) > cat /root/profile-1-times | grep DIR | head -n 3 0.00 0.00 us 0.00 us 0.00 us 1 RELEASEDIR 0.27 66.79 us 66.79 us 66.79 us 1 OPENDIR 98.65 12190.30 us 9390.88 us 14989.73 us 2 READDIRP > cat /root/profile-10-times | grep DIR | head -n 3 0.00 0.00 us 0.00 us 0.00 us 10 RELEASEDIR 0.64 108.02 us 85.72 us 131.96 us 10 OPENDIR 99.36 8388.64 us 5174.71 us 14808.77 us 20 READDIRP This testcase shows perfect scaling. 10 times the request, results in 10 times the gluster-operations. I would say ideally there should be no difference in the number of gluster-operations, regardless of how often a directory is read in a short amount of time (with no changes in between) Is there something we can do to enable caching or otherwise improve performance? -- Matthias
Attachment:
gluster-testcase-no-caching-of-dir-operations-for-fuse.sh
Description: Bourne shell script
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