[Gluster-users] Ext4 safe for production use with gluster?

[Daniel Maher]

On 07/07/2010 08:37 AM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:

> Initially, the reading suggested that ext4 would provide a significant
> performance boost. Quite possibly since it delays write longer,
> latencies of the network storage is hidden even better especially for
> temporary files.
>
> After subsequent reading, it seems that the cost of the massive delay
> allocation that could blow up really bad in the event the system
> crash.

> Assuming I'm using the most likely disk writing applications I'm using
> is KVM, exim, dovecot, mysql and postgresql, would ext4 be safe for
> production use or should I stick to ext3?

We set up a small test case in our environment to test Gluster / ext4 in 
a simple 4-node client-replication setup.  After running it through the 
regular Bonnie / IOZone / FFSB tests, we determined that it _worked_, 
but that compared to ext3, we saw some strange timing results overall 
(wierd lag spikes, etc).  Unfortunately the project was scrapped early 
on (for external reasons), and no further investigation was done.  YMMV.

If you do go ahead and put together a test suite, i'm sure i'm not the 
only one that would be interested in seeing the results. :)

-- 
Daniel Maher <dma+gluster AT witbe DOT net>