[Gluster-users] tuning gluster performance vs. nfs

[Marcus Bointon]

On 19 Jan 2011, at 22:24, Ryan Williams wrote:

> The web servers are serving pages built with eZ Publish, a CMS that
> reads a lot of small files to build a page.

...and the majority of those files probably don't change much, making them perfect cache material. Since ezPublish is PHP, I'd strongly suggest using an accelerator like APC if you're not already as that will immediately reduce the majority of file requests to stat calls to check mod times. You can turn the stat check off and files will be served straight from the cache and not hit the disk at all, however, in a clustered scenario you need to be able to force re-reading on all nodes when you do change files, which you can probably do with a script that turns on stat checks, loads every PHP file you have (or at least all changed ones) then turns stat checks off again. This will help regardless of what underlying disk system you use.

Another approach is to keep static files (i.e. app code) on local storage and sync that manually across nodes and only put dynamic stuff (e.g. user uploads) on the gluster volume. That's what I do.

Marcus