[Gluster-users] Fwd: files not syncing up with glusterfs 3.1.2

[Brent A Nelson]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2011, Joe Landman wrote:

> On 02/21/2011 09:53 AM, David Lloyd wrote:
>> Likewise, we're aware of the very poor performance of gluster with small
>> files. We serve a lot of large files, and we're now moved most of the small
>> files off to a normal nfs server. Again small files aren't known to break
>> gluster are they?
>
>  Small files are the bane of every cluster file system.  We recommend using 
> NFS client with GlusterFS for smaller files, simply due to the additional 
> caching you can get out of the NFS system.
>

Those who are looking for better metadata performance might want to see if 
MooseFS fits their needs.  It uses a metadata server which caches the 
entire filesystem metadata in RAM, so it seems to be very responsive.  I 
have my home directory on GlusterFS and I did a quick trial on MooseFS. 
du on GlusterFS (native FUSE, not NFS) was 1 minute 8 seconds, du on 
MooseFS was 2 seconds.

Good metadata performance should equate to good small-file performance 
(but you'll want to run your own tests to be sure).  Note that MooseFS 
stores data with a fixed ~64KB block size, so it will be somewhat wasteful 
of space on very small files.

Thanks,

Brent Nelson
Director of Computing
Dept. of Physics
University of Florida