[Gluster-devel] lookup caching

[Olivier Le Cam]

Hi -

Raghavendra G wrote:
> 
>     Well, as far as I understand the problem is rather that folders on
>     the path of the targeted file are not cached at all by io-cache. 
> 
> 
> Did you mean caching dentries, when you said "caching directories"? 
> io-cache only caches file data. Also note that it is not a translator 
> which does metadata (stats) caching.

That's it. Metadata caching is exactly what I would like to implement 
but I haven't been able to find which part of code is dealing with 
metadatas so far.

>     This is why accessing a file makes (quite a lot) network traffic and
>     can introduce bottlenecks because each folder is stated on the
>     servers before delivering the file, even if that file is indeed
>     cached by io-cache.
> 
> 
> io-cache only sends stat on the file being read not to all of its parent 
> directories. I am not getting the reason you are concerned with too many 
> stat calls. io-cache (during read and when file is cached) only sends a 
> single stat call and that too if "cache-timeout" number of seconds have 
> been elapsed since last validation.

Well I know understand that I don't have to focus my attention on 
io-cache at all anymore.

In order to reach acceptable performances for my webfarm (at least the 
same than I have with an NFS server), I really have to find a way for 
limiting as much as possible stat calls over the network. Stat calls 
introduce too much latency before the glusterfs client is able to 
deliver a file (even with io-cache enabled). This makes performances 
absolutly terrible!

Note: I'm not concerned at all by file being modified by other clients. 
The frontal reverse-proxy always forwards http connections to the same 
webserver (according to the domain name), but in case of failover. 
Having matadatas caching would then __greatly__ improve overall 
performance in this situation!

Hope you can put me on the right way, please!

Thanks and best regards,
-- 
Olivier