[Gluster-users] New Development Update - [1.4.X releases]

Fri Jun 6 21:28:35 UTC 2008

One more addition to this release is

* errno compatibility:
   This will enable a process to see the proper errnos in cases of cross OS
server/client setups.

Regards,
Amar

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Amar S. Tumballi <amar at zresearch.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>  As the topic says, I want to give you all a snapshot of whats coming in
> 1.4.x series and where is our main focus for the release.
>
> 1.4.x -
> * Performance of GlusterFS (reduced CPU and memory usage, protocol
> enhancements)
> * Non blocking I/O - to give more responsiveness to GlusterFS, remove the
> issues faced due to timeout, freezing etc.
> * Few features to handle different verticals of storage requirements.
>
> The tarballs will be available from -
> http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/1.4-qa/
> Advised to use only latest tarballs in directory, and Report bugs through
> Savannah Bug tracking system only, so its easier for us to track them.
>
> You can shift to 'glusterfs--mainline--3.0' branch (from which glusterfs
> -1.4.0qa releases are made) if you want to try the latest fixes. Though none
> of these are not yet advised for production usage.
>
> That was a higher level description of what is coming. Here are exact
> module/translator wise description of whats inside the tarball for you.
>
> * nbio - (non-blocking I/O) This feature comes with significant/drastic
> changes in transport layer. Lot of drastic changes to improve the
> responsiveness of server and to handle more connections. Designed to scale
> for higher number of servers/clients.
>   - NOTE that this release of QA has only TCP/IP transport layer supported,
> work is going on to port it to ib-verbs module.
>
> * binary protocol - this reduces the amount of header/protocol data
> transfered over wire significantly, also reduces the CPU usage as there is
> no binary to ASCII (and vica-versa) involved at protocol layer. The
> difference may not be significant for large file performance, but for small
> files and meta operations this will be phenomenal improvement.
>
> * BDB storage translator - Few people want to use lot and lot of small
> files over large storage volume, but for them the filesystem performance for
> small files was a main bottleneck. Number of inodes spent, overall kernel
> overhead in create cycle etc was quite high. With introduction of BDB
> storage at the backend, we tried to solve this issue. This is aimed at
> giving tremendous boost for cases where, millions and millions of small
> files are in a single directory.
> [NOTE: This is not posix complaint as no file attribute fops are not
> supported over these files, however file rename and having multiple
> directory levels, having symlinks is supported].
> GlusterFS BDB options here:
> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Translators_v1.3#Berkeley_DB
> Also refer this link -
> http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/berkeley-db/db/gsg/CXX/dbconfig.html, so you can tune BDB better. We are still investigating the performance
> numbers for files bigger than page-size, but you can give it a try if your
> avg file size is well below 100k mark.
>
>
> * libglusterfsclient - A API interface for glusterfs (for file
> create/write, open/write, open/read cases). Which will merge all these calls
> in one fop and gives a much better performance by removing the latency
> caused by lot of calls happening in a single file i/o. (Aimed at small file
> performance, but users may have to write their own apps using libglusterfs
> client.
> Check this tool -
> http://ftp.zresearch.com/pub/gluster/glusterfs/misc/glfs-bm.c
> You need to compile this like ' # gcc -lglusterfsclient -o glfs-bm
> glfs-bm.c'
>
>
> * mod_glusterfs: Aimed at solving the problem web hosting companies have.
> We embedded glusterfs into apache-1.3.x, lighttpd-1.4.x, lighttpd-1.5, (and
> work going on for apache-2.0). By doing this, we could save the context
> switch overhead which was significant if web servers were using glusterfs
> mountpoint as document root. So, now, the web servers itself can be cluster
> filesystem aware hence they see much bigger storage system well within their
> space.
> For Apache 1.3 -
> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Getting_modglusterfs_to_work
> For Lighttpd -
> http://gluster.org/docs/index.php/Mod_glusterfs_for_lighttpd
>
> * improvement to io-cache to handle mod-glusterfs better.
>
> Other significant work going on parallel to these things are:
> * work towards proper input validation and abort in the cases where any
> memory corruption is seen.
> * work towards reducing the overhead caused by runtime memory allocations
> and free.
> * work on reducing the string based operations in the code base, which
> reduces the CPU usage.
> * log msgs improvement (reduce the log amount, make log rotate work
> seemlessly).
> * strict check in init() time, so the mounting itself wont happen if some
> config is not valid. (To get the points mentioned in 'Best Practices' page
> into the codebase itself).
> * Make sure the port on other OSes work fine.
>
> We expect to get this branch to stability very soon (within a month or so),
> so we won't be having complains about small file performance and
> timeout/hang issues anymore (from 1.3.x branch). Hence your help in testing
> this out for your application,  your configuration, and reporting bugs would
> help us to get it to stability even faster.
>
> Regards,
> GlusterFS Team
>
> PS: Currently this release of qa is not tested on any other OS than
> GNU/Linux. I will write back as soon as we have a fix for each specific OS.
>
> Regards,
> Amar
>
> --
> Amar Tumballi
> Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker
> [bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org]
> http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!

-- 
Amar Tumballi
Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker
[bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org]
http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!
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