[Gluster-devel] Handling huge number of file read requests

[Amrik Singh]

Hi Guys,

We are hoping that glusterfs would help us in the particular problem 
that we are facing with our cluster. We have a visual search application 
that runs on a cluster with around 300 processors. These compute nodes 
run a search for images that are hosted on an NFS server. In certain 
circumstances all these compute nodes are sending requests for query 
images at extremely high rates (20-40 images per second). When 300 nodes 
send 20-40 requests per second for these images, the NFS server just 
can't cope with it and we start seeing a lot of retransmissions and a 
very high wait time on the server as well as on the nodes. The images 
are sized at around 2MB each.

With the current application we are not in a position where we can 
quickly change the way things are being done so we are looking for a 
file system that can handle this kind of situation. We tried glusterfs 
with the default settings but we did not see any improvement. Is there a 
way to tune glusterfs to handle this kind of situation.

I can provide more details about our setup as needed.


thanks

-- 
Amrik Singh
Idée Inc.
http://www.ideeinc.com