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

Mon Jun 9 18:14:17 UTC 2008

Currently our target is to get a solid state for what we have in code base
already (with added efficiency). There are lot of pending issues about
consistency and locking in corner cases. (for example: afr write order,
unify rename issue etc).
Our main focus with this release is to have a codebase with no complaints.
(about what it claims what it supports). Also we understand that now our
logging is not user friendly, which we are working to make userfriendly and
no excessive logs.

As of now, our plan is to start with new development features as soon as
basic things needed for above mentioned points are complete. We will try to
start development with new (hot add/remove, distributed namespace, lot more
options with management tools) features at July beginning.

Regards,
Amar

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Onyx <lists at bmail.be> wrote:

> Any news on the schedule for the live config change (add/remove volumes
> without having to restart glusterfs)?
>
>
>
>
> Amar S. Tumballi wrote:
>
>> 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!
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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-- 
Amar Tumballi
Gluster/GlusterFS Hacker
[bulde on #gluster/irc.gnu.org]
http://www.zresearch.com - Commoditizing Super Storage!
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