[Gluster-users] stripe nfs performance

[tegner at renget.se]

I'm in the process of evaluating gluster, and to that end I installed
Gluster Storage Platform 3.0 (using the "usb-method") on four servers. I
created a striped volume and exported it as nfs (and glusterfs).

I nfs-mounted this volume on a node and copied a file about 400 MB large,
this took about twice the time compared to copy to an ordinary nfs-mounted
partition. Are these timings reasonable?

Then I tested to copy one instance of this file from several nodes
simultaneously, but those timings did not indicate superior performance
for the gluster mounted file system: in all cases it took about twice as
long time to complete all copying to the gluster mounted system doing the
copying from two and three nodes at the same time (as compared to doing it
to a singel nfs mounted partition).

Hardware is nothing fancy, disks are old sata (about 35GB), and all nodes
sit on a gigabit switch.

I guess I'm doing something wrong here, but since I'm using the Gluster
Storage Platform there shouldn't be too many ways to go wrong ...

Regards,

/jon