[Gluster-users] Performance and redundancy help

[Chad]

I am new to glusterfs, and this list, please let me know if I have made any mistakes in posting this to the list.
I am not sure what your standards are.

I came across glusterfs last week, it was super easy to set-up and test and is almost exactly what I want/need.
I set up 2 "glusterfs servers" that serve up a mirrored raid5 disk partitioned into 3 5oogb partitions to 6 clients.
I am using round robin DNS, but I also tried to use heartbeat and ldirectord (see details below).
Each server has 2 NICs: 1 for the clients, the other has a cross over cable connecting the 2 servers. Both NICs are 1000mbps.

There are only 2 issues.
#1. When one of the servers goes down the clients hang at least for a little while (more testing is needed) I am not sure if the clients can recover at all.
#2. The read/write tests I performed came in at 1.6 when using glusterfs, NFS on all the same machines came in at 11, and a direct test on the data server came
in at 111. How do I improve the performance?

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My glusterfs set-up:
2 supermicro dual Xeon 3.0 ghz CPUs, 8gb ram, 4 @ 750gb seagate sata HDs, 3 in raid5 with 1 hot spare. (data servers)
6 supermicro dual AMD 2.8 ghz CPUs, 4gb ram, 2 @ 250gb seagate sata HDs in raid 1. (client machines)
glusterfs is set-up with round robin DNS to handle the load balancing of the 2 data servers.

I also tried heartbeat with a virtual IP and ldirectord to redirect the traffic, but when I took down server 1, there was like a 10 second delay before server 2
took over the virtual IP and the client hung.

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^C