[Gluster-devel] Re: New Development Update - [1.4.X releases]

[Onyx]

Any news on the schedule for the live config change (add/remove volumes 
without having to restart glusterfs)?



Amar S. Tumballi wrote:
> One more addition to this release is
>
> * errno compatibility:
>    This will enable a process to see the proper errnos in cases of cross OS
> server/client setups.
>
> Regards,
> Amar
>
> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Amar S. Tumballi <amar at zresearch.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi,
>>  As the topic says, I want to give you all a snapshot of whats coming in
>> 1.4.x series and where is our main focus for the release.
>>
>> 1.4.x -
>> * Performance of GlusterFS (reduced CPU and memory usage, protocol
>> enhancements)
>> * Non blocking I/O - to give more responsiveness to GlusterFS, remove the
>> issues faced due to timeout, freezing etc.
>> * Few features to handle different verticals of storage requirements.
>>
>> The tarballs will be available from -
>> http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/1.4-qa/
>> Advised to use only latest tarballs in directory, and Report bugs through
>> Savannah Bug tracking system only, so its easier for us to track them.
>>
>> You can shift to 'glusterfs--mainline--3.0' branch (from which glusterfs
>> -1.4.0qa releases are made) if you want to try the latest fixes. Though none
>> of these are not yet advised for production usage.
>>
>> That was a higher level description of what is coming. Here are exact
>> module/translator wise description of whats inside the tarball for you.
>>
>> * nbio - (non-blocking I/O) This feature comes with significant/drastic
>> changes in transport layer. Lot of drastic changes to improve the
>> responsiveness of server and to handle more connections. Designed to scale
>> for higher number of servers/clients.
>>   - NOTE that this release of QA has only TCP/IP transport layer supported,
>> work is going on to port it to ib-verbs module.
>>
>> * binary protocol - this reduces the amount of header/protocol data
>> transfered over wire significantly, also reduces the CPU usage as there is
>> no binary to ASCII (and vica-versa) involved at protocol layer. The
>> difference may not be significant for large file performance, but for small
>> files and meta operations this will be phenomenal improvement.
>>
>> * BDB storage translator - Few people want to use lot and lot of small
>> files over large storage volume, but for them the filesystem performance for
>> small files was a main bottleneck. Number of inodes spent, overall kernel
>> overhead in create cycle etc was quite high. With introduction of BDB
>> storage at the backend, we tried to solve this issue. This is aimed at
>> giving tremendous boost for cases where, millions and millions of small
>> files are in a single directory.
>> [NOTE: This is not posix complaint as no file attribute fops are not
>> supported over these files, however file rename and having multiple
>> directory levels, having symlinks is supported].
>> GlusterFS BDB options here:
>> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Translators_v1.3#Berkeley_DB
>> Also refer this link -
>> http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/berkeley-db/db/gsg/CXX/dbconfig.html, so you can tune BDB better. We are still investigating the performance
>> numbers for files bigger than page-size, but you can give it a try if your
>> avg file size is well below 100k mark.
>>
>>
>> * libglusterfsclient - A API interface for glusterfs (for file
>> create/write, open/write, open/read cases). Which will merge all these calls
>> in one fop and gives a much better performance by removing the latency
>> caused by lot of calls happening in a single file i/o. (Aimed at small file
>> performance, but users may have to write their own apps using libglusterfs
>> client.
>> Check this tool -
>> http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/misc/glfs-bm.c
>> You need to compile this like ' # gcc -lglusterfsclient -o glfs-bm
>> glfs-bm.c'
>>
>>
>> * mod_glusterfs: Aimed at solving the problem web hosting companies have.
>> We embedded glusterfs into apache-1.3.x, lighttpd-1.4.x, lighttpd-1.5, (and
>> work going on for apache-2.0). By doing this, we could save the context
>> switch overhead which was significant if web servers were using glusterfs
>> mountpoint as document root. So, now, the web servers itself can be cluster
>> filesystem aware hence they see much bigger storage system well within their
>> space.
>> For Apache 1.3 -
>> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Getting_modglusterfs_to_work
>> For Lighttpd -
>> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Mod_glusterfs_for_lighttpd
>>
>> * improvement to io-cache to handle mod-glusterfs better.
>>
>> Other significant work going on parallel to these things are:
>> * work towards proper input validation and abort in the cases where any
>> memory corruption is seen.
>> * work towards reducing the overhead caused by runtime memory allocations
>> and free.
>> * work on reducing the string based operations in the code base, which
>> reduces the CPU usage.
>> * log msgs improvement (reduce the log amount, make log rotate work
>> seemlessly).
>> * strict check in init() time, so the mounting itself wont happen if some
>> config is not valid. (To get the points mentioned in 'Best Practices' page
>> into the codebase itself).
>> * Make sure the port on other OSes work fine.
>>
>> We expect to get this branch to stability very soon (within a month or so),
>> so we won't be having complains about small file performance and
>> timeout/hang issues anymore (from 1.3.x branch). Hence your help in testing
>> this out for your application,  your configuration, and reporting bugs would
>> help us to get it to stability even faster.
>>
>> Regards,
>> GlusterFS Team
>>
>> PS: Currently this release of qa is not tested on any other OS than
>> GNU/Linux. I will write back as soon as we have a fix for each specific OS.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Amar
>>
>> --
>> Amar Tumballi
>> Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker
>> [bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org]
>> http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!
>>     
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