[Gluster-users] NFS vs native fuse

[Dave Warren]

On 2015-04-28 14:44, Kingsley wrote:
> I've seen a lot of talk about mounting gluster volumes via NFS, but
> despite searching around, I can't find (apart from performance in some
> cases) why you'd want to do this.

Performance seems like the big one in situations where it's applicable. 
Compatibility where the native FUSE client can't be installed or 
maintained also seems like a reasonable reason to use NFS, since the NFS 
client may already exist.

Bandwidth is also a consideration, the FUSE client will upload multiple 
copies based on the replica setting for the volume, so if the client is 
connected at 100Mb/s or over wifi, and the servers are cross-connected 
on a 10Gb/s backplane, having the client upload multiple copies vs 
having the NFS server handle the replicas may have an impact on very 
large files.

Finally, NFS seems to have a lighter CPU footprint on the client, at the 
possible cost of higher server CPU load, although this is anecdotal 
(from my own experience), and probably a mixed bag.

I have switched back and forth (and can re-mount my entire gluster 
infrastructure with the flip of a single distributed config file) and 
for me, NFS ends up performing better, the native gluster client is just 
too slow.

-- 
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren