[Gluster-users] gluster local vs local = gluster x4 slower

[Jeremy Enos]

This test is pretty easy to replicate anywhere- only takes 1 disk, one 
machine, one tarball.  Untarring to local disk directly vs thru gluster 
is about 4.5x faster.  At first I thought this may be due to a slow host 
(Opteron 2.4ghz).  But it's not- same configuration, on a much faster 
machine (dual 3.33ghz Xeon) yields the performance below.

####THIS TEST WAS TO A LOCAL DISK THRU GLUSTER####
[root at ac33 jenos]# time tar xzf 
/scratch/jenos/intel/l_cproc_p_11.1.064_intel64.tgz

real    0m41.290s
user    0m14.246s
sys     0m2.957s

####THIS TEST WAS TO A LOCAL DISK (BYPASS GLUSTER)####
[root at ac33 jenos]# cd /export/jenos/
[root at ac33 jenos]# time tar xzf 
/scratch/jenos/intel/l_cproc_p_11.1.064_intel64.tgz

real    0m8.983s
user    0m6.857s
sys     0m1.844s

####THESE ARE TEST FILE DETAILS####
[root at ac33 jenos]# tar tzvf 
/scratch/jenos/intel/l_cproc_p_11.1.064_intel64.tgz  |wc -l
109
[root at ac33 jenos]# ls -l 
/scratch/jenos/intel/l_cproc_p_11.1.064_intel64.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jenos ac 804385203 2010-02-07 06:32 
/scratch/jenos/intel/l_cproc_p_11.1.064_intel64.tgz
[root at ac33 jenos]#

These are the relevant performance options I'm using in my .vol file:

#------------Performance Options-------------------

volume readahead
   type performance/read-ahead
   option page-count 4           # 2 is default option
   option force-atime-update off # default is off
   subvolumes ghome
end-volume

volume writebehind
   type performance/write-behind
   option cache-size 1MB
   subvolumes readahead
end-volume

volume cache
   type performance/io-cache
   option cache-size 1GB
   subvolumes writebehind
end-volume

What can I do to improve gluster's performance?

     Jeremy