[Gluster-users] Very slow directory listing and high CPU usage on replicated volume

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2012 at 08:03:21PM -0400, Jonathan Lefman wrote:
>    Soon after loading up about 100 MB of small files (about 300kb each),
>    the drive usage is at 1.1T.

That is very odd. What do you get if you run du and df on the individual
bricks themselves? 100MB is only ~330 files of 300KB each.

Did you specify any special options to mkfs.ext4? Maybe -l 512 would help,
as the xattrs are more likely to sit within the indoes themselves.

If you start everything from scratch, it would be interesting to see df
stats when the filesystem is empty.  It may be that a huge amount of space
has been allocated to inodes.  If you expect most of your files >16KB then
you could add -i 16384 to mkfs.ext4 to reduce the space reserved for inodes. 
But using xfs would be better, as it doesn't reserve any space for inodes,
it allocates it dynamically.

Ignore the comment that glusterfs is "not designed for handling large count
small files" - 300KB is not small.

Regards,

Brian.