[Gluster-users] Very slow roaming profiles on top of glusterfs

[Diego Remolina]

Hi,

I am running two glusterfs servers as replicas. I have a 3rd server
which provides quorum. Since gluster was introduced, we have had an
issue where windows roaming profiles are extremely slow. The initial
setup was done on 3.6.x and since 3.7.x has small file performance
improvements, I upgraded to 3.7.3, but that has not helped.

It seems that for some reason gluster is very slow when dealing with
lots of small files. I am not sure how to really troubleshoot this via
samba, but I have come up with other tests that produce rather
disconcerting results as shown below.

If I run directly on the brick:
[root at ysmha01 /]# time ( find
/bricks/hdds/brick/home/jgibbs/.winprofile.V2 -type f > /dev/null )
real 0m3.683s
user 0m0.042s
sys 0m0.154s

Now running on the gluster volume mounted via fuse:
[root at ysmha01 /]# mount | grep export
10.0.1.6:/export on /export type fuse.glusterfs
(rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,max_read=131072)

[root at ysmha01 /]# time ( find /export/home/jgibbs/.winprofile.V2 -type
f > /dev/null )
real 0m57.812s
user 0m0.118s
sys 0m0.374s

In general, the time to run the command on this particular user can be
up to 2 minutes. If I run the command on the brick first, then it
seems the time to run on the mounted gluster volume is lower like in
the example above. I assume some caching in preserved.

This particular user has 13,216 files in his roaming profile, which
adds up to about 452MB of data.

The server performance over samba for copying big files (both read and
write) is great, I can almost max out the gigabit connections on the
desktops.

Reading from samba share on the server and writing to local drive:
111MB/s (Copying a 650MB iso file)
Reading from local drive and writing to server samba share: 94MB/s
(Copying a 3.2GB ISO file)

The servers are connected to the network with 10Gbit adapters and also
use separate adapters; one 10 Gbit adapter is used for services, and
other for the backend storage communication.

The servers have hardware raid controllers and the samba shares are on
top of an Areca ARC-1882 controller, with a volume made out of 12 2TB
drives in raid 6.

If you can provide any steps to better troubleshoot this problem and
fix the issue, I will really appreciate it.

Diego

Further details about the machines below:

[root at ysmha01 /]# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.1.1503 (Core)

[root at ysmha01 /]# gluster volume info export
Volume Name: export
Type: Replicate
Volume ID: b4353b3f-6ef6-4813-819a-8e85e5a95cff
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 1 x 2 = 2
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: 10.0.1.7:/bricks/hdds/brick
Brick2: 10.0.1.6:/bricks/hdds/brick
Options Reconfigured:
performance.io-cache: on
performance.io-thread-count: 64
nfs.disable: on
cluster.server-quorum-type: server
performance.cache-size: 1024MB
server.allow-insecure: on
cluster.server-quorum-ratio: 51%

Each server has dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz with
32GB of memory.