[Gluster-users] AWS usage in a 3 replicator set with arbiter

[Tim]

Hi List,

I was wondering if anyone has implemented gluster successfully in AWS, 
and has some tips on streamlining the process to increase throughput and 
possibly reduce latency. (Sorry in advance if this list has seen this 
problem a lot)

My current setup is as follows;

gfs-server1 - ap-southeast-2 (AZ1)
gfs-server2 - ap-southeast-2 (AZ2)
gfs-server3 - ap-southeast-1 (AZ1) (Arbiter)
web-server1 - apsoutheast2-az1 (Mounted as gluster/nfs to gfs-server1)
web-server2 - apsoutheast2-az2 (Mounted as gluster/nfs to gfs-server2)

Using latest 3.7 package from the Ubuntu launchpad ppa.

I have one server in each availability zone within Australia with the 
arbiter volume over in Singapore. This will hopefully act as a fall back 
if ever there is a problem connecting internally between the two 
availability zones in the same region. Assuming each gluster server can 
router externally and not internally.

This is for a webserver with a lot of wordpress + magento installations. 
So it has a lot of files.

I mounted the gluster volume and started copying across the files and it 
was terribly slow. (See below for data)[1]

My Questions are as follows:
I see from the archives and FAQ's that people have sped up copies by 
using xargs and having multiple threads per sub folders. While this is a 
good idea, is there any other way to increase throughput?
Also I did a few tests against different mount points on NFS and 
GlusterFS to see what the difference was, and NFS kicks the glusterfs 
mount out of the park. Is there a specific reason for this?
Would removing the arbiter volume or assuming for example sake; that 
there was a third availability zone in ap-southeast-2 so latency was not 
an issue, increase my throughput? As the gluster-client has to write the 
data to the 2 gluster volumes and the meta-data to the arbiter would 
this help in reducing the time per file?
(Also a non-gluster question that no-one has to answer, has anyone tried 
Amazons' Elastic File System (EFS) and is it comparable to gluster?)


Thank you for reading the wall of text, and I appreciate all the hard 
work everyone has put into this great product.

Cheers,
Tim

[1] Data:

|time cp -Rv wordpress/ /var/gluster-nfs/dir/wordpress/ real 165m4.445s 
user 0m0.592s sys 0m3.227s|

|du -shc wordpress/ 374M wordpress/ find wordpress/ | wc -l 4955 (It 
works out to be on average 2 seconds per file) |


NFS DD Write:

|sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=1024 412738+0 records in 412738+0 
records out 422643712 bytes (423 MB) copied, 85.4381 s, 4.9 MB/s|

GlusterFS DD Write (1):

|sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=./testgf bs=1024k count=10000 12+0 records in 
12+0 records out 12582912 bytes (13 MB) copied, 117.974 s, 107 kB/s|

GlusterFS DD Write: (2):

|sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=./testgf1 bs=1024 count=10000 10000+0 records in 
10000+0 records out 10240000 bytes (10 MB) copied, 56.8728 s, 180 kB/s|

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