[Gluster-users] Usage Case: just not getting the performance I was hoping for

[Sean Fulton]

One question I have:

In a case where four client nodes need equal read/write access to the 
data, is it better to have four Gluster nodes in a replicated 
configuration with each mounting the gluster volume locally, or having 
TWO Gluster server nodes with the four clients mounting the volume from 
the two servers? In other words, the replication would only touch two 
nodes instead of four; would that improve performance.

Also, would NFS be better in this case, mounting from just ONE of the 
server nodes, or using Gluster native client to mount from either of the 
two server nodes. Or can NFS mount from any/all of the gluster nodes 
using the gluster NFS server.

Two questions that I'm not clear on after reading the docs.

sean



On 03/15/2012 09:39 AM, Jeff Darcy wrote:
> On 03/15/2012 12:09 AM, D. Dante Lorenso wrote:
>> After tweaking settings the best we could, we were able to copy files
>> from Mac and Win7 desktops across the network but only able to get 50-60
>> MB/s transfer speeds tops when sending large files (>  2GB) to gluster.
>> When copying a directory of small files, we get<= 1 MB/s performance!
>>
>> ...
>>
>> When using a single Win2008 server with Raid 10 on 4 drives, shared to
>> the network with built-in CIFS, we get much better (near 2x) performance
>> than this 8-server gluster setup using Samba for smb/cifs and a total of
>> 16 drives.
> Please bear in mind that GlusterFS in general is optimized for aggregate
> bandwidth, and single-stream bandwidth is often dominated by the *latency* of
> the underlying network.  Combine this with the fact that the replication piece
> in particular is very latency-sensitive, and a single copy with replication
> becomes very much a worst case.  If what you're looking for is bandwidth, I
> suggest testing with many I/O streams and ideally many clients.  If you're more
> concerned with latency, you should probably measure that at both the network
> and storage levels, in addition to using the GlusterFS tools to measure at that
> level.  That should give you some ideas about where you can drive out latency
> and improve performance for those use cases.
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-- 
Sean Fulton
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