[Gluster-devel] stability and configurations

[Kevan Benson]

Jacques Mattheij wrote:
> Hello there gluster developers and users,
>
> I'm trying to get a handle on what it takes to get glusterfs to
> work reliable. After several weeks of testing we have to date
> not been able to get it to work stable in our setup, and I'm
> beginning to wonder if there is a possible statistical
> approach to finding out what works and what doesn't rather
> than to try to go about it one bug at a time.

I've found that for high-availability, I get FAR more stable and 
fault-tolerant setups with all unify and afr done on the client.  The 
unify translator seems to handle server failures quite gracefully, while 
relying on round-robin DNS as with the high Availability Storage Example 
in the GlusterFS wiki leads to transport disconnected errors for me.  
When it's all done on the client side, there's just a short delay 
(defined by the transport-timeout value)  for the client the first time 
it reads or writes after a server is failed and then the operation 
continues as normal.