On 9/14/20 6:40 AM, Nix wrote:
On 1 Sep 2020, Ram Ramesh uttered the following:
After thinking through this, I really like the idea of simply
recording programs to SSD and move one file at a time based on some
aging algorithms of my own. I will move files back and forth as needed
during overnight hours creating my own caching effect.
I don't really see the benefit here for a mythtv installation in
particular. I/O patterns for large media are extremely non-seeky: even
with multiple live recordings at once, an HDD would easily be able to
keep up since it'd only have to seek a few times per 30s period given
the size of most plausible write caches.
In general, doing the hierarchical storage thing is useful if you have
stuff you will almost never access that you can keep on slower media
(or, in this case, stuff whose access patterns are non-seeky that you
can keep on media with a high seek time). But in this case, that would
be 'all of it'. Even if it weren't, by-hand copying won't deal with the
thing you really need to keep on fast-seek media: metadata. You can't
build your own filesystem with metadata on SSD and data on non-SSD this
way! But both LVM caching and bcache do exactly that.
Agreed, all I need is a file level LRU caching effect. All recently
accessed/created files in SSD and the ones untouched for a while in
spinning disks. I was trying to get this done using a block level
caching methods which is too complicated for the purpose.
My aim is not to improve the performance, instead improve on power. I
want my raid disks to be mostly sitting idle holding files and spin up
and serve only when called for. Most of the time, I am
watching/recording recent shows/programs or popular movies and typically
that is about 200-400GB of storage. With ultraviolet, prime, netflix and
disney, movies are more often sourced from online content and TV shows
get deleted after watching and new ones gets added in that space. So,
typical usage seem ideal for popular SSD size (with a large backup store
in spinning disk), I think. This means my spinning disks are going to
wake up once a day or two at most. More often I expect it to be once a
week or have periods of high activity and die down to nothing for a
while. Instead, currently they are running 24x7 which does not make sense.
Regards
Ramesh
