[Gluster-devel] ls again

[Reinis Rozitis]

Hello,
there have been some threads in the past about 'ls' being slow on large file
directories but my question is more regarding documentation:

According to http://www.gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_FAQ - "Just
doing "ls" doesn't trigger stat call. It should be fast as this is called
only on the namespace child."

But actually on our system/setup (where namespace resides on seperate
partition (c0d0) and the storage bricks are different pairs of disks
(c1d0-c2d6) mounted together with unify) we see that after doing 'ls' a
sequence starts which reads every storage brick (and not only namespace).


In iostat it looks something like this (I hope the spacing won't break):

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
0.00    0.00    0.50    0.00    0.00   99.50

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
cciss/c0d0        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d0        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d1        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d2        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d3      189.00      3008.00         0.00       3008          0
cciss/c1d4        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d5        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d6        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d7        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d8        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c1d9        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d0        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d1        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d2        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d3        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d4        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d5        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
cciss/c2d6        0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0


There is only one partition being read at time when it finishes it switches
to the next. Sometimes the loop goes even 2 or 3 times before the
directory/file listing is returned. So it takes pretty long after the
mounted partition becomes responsive.

I wonder is it supposed to be so or the 'ls' from OpenSuse "breaks" the
whole thing (because it adds some commandline params on its own - full
command looks like 'ls -N --color=tty -T 0 -1')

wbr
Reinis Rozitis