[Gluster-users] Creating a glusterfs demo on a notebook and run bonnie++?

[Zack Perry]

Hi, 

Since a few days ago, I have been trying to create a glusterfs demo to show my boss that this piece of software has potential to us.  I have been using the following hardware and software combination:
hardware: Dell Studio XPS 16, Intel i7 CPU (4 core), 8GB RAM, 128 GB Samsung PW80 SSDOS: Ubuntu 10.04LTS but running the backported 2.6.35-23 kernelglusterfs 3.1.2 deb package downloaded from the gluster Web site.
I created 3 KVM guests, all on a LVM volume. Each guest resides in its own logic volume (16GB each), has 512MB RAM, and 2 vcpus. All guests use virtio for both storage and networking.

Two of the guests are glusterfs servers in replicated configuration (replica=2), the 3rd guest acts as a client.  The glusterfs native protocol is used for mounting in the client guest.

I then try to run bonnie++ in the client machine.  When running directly, the following takes less than a minute wall time to finish:

/usr/sbin/bonnie++ -d /tmp/foo

But when pointing the -d to a subdirectory in the imported volume, even the first part:

Writing a byte at a time...

takes forever.  

In the Virtual Machine Manager, the client shows a lot network traffic, but little is accomplished with such traffic.

Currently, the glusterfs configuration is default for everything.  I was hoping to use these defaults to generate a set of baseline data, and go from there.  But looks like the way it is, I will have to take a different approach.

Question:  How can I make bonnie++ run faster with my "demo" setup?  I would love to hear some tuning tips that can make my demo run faster!

Thanks,

-- Zack