[Gluster-users] performance - what can I expect

Pascal Suter pascal.suter at dalco.ch
Thu May 2 07:51:12 UTC 2019


Hi Amar

thanks for rolling this back up. Actually i have done some more 
benchmarking and fiddled with the config to finally reach a performance 
figure i could live with. I now can squeeze about 3GB/s out of that 
server which seems to be close to what i can get out of its network 
uplink (using IP over Omni-Path). The system is now set up and in 
production so i can't run any benchmarks on it anymore but i will get 
back at benchmarking in the near future to test some storage related 
hardware, and i will try it with gluster on top again.

embarassingly the biggest performance issue was that the default 
installation of the server was running the "performance" profile of 
tuned. once i switched it to "throughput-performance" performance 
increased dramatically.

the volume info now looks pretty unspectacular:

Volume Name: storage
Type: Distribute
Volume ID: c81c7e46-add5-4d88-9945-24cf7947ef8c
Status: Started
Snapshot Count: 0
Number of Bricks: 3
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: themis01:/data/brick1/brick
Brick2: themis01:/data/brick2/brick
Brick3: themis01:/data/brick3/brick
Options Reconfigured:
transport.address-family: inet
nfs.disable: on

thanks for pointing out gluster volume profile, i'll have a go with it 
during my next benchmarking session. so far i was using iostat to track 
brick-level io performance during my benchmarks.

the main question i wanted to ask was, if there is a general rule of 
thumb, how much throughput of the original bare brick throughput would 
be expected to be left over once gluster is added on top of it. to give 
you an example: when I use a parallel filesystem like Lustre or BeeGFS i 
usually expect to get at least about 85% of the raw storage target 
throughput as aggregated bandwidth over a multi-node test out of my 
Lustre or BeeGFS setup. I consider any numbers below that to be too low 
and therefore will have to dig into performance tuning to find the 
bottle neck.

i was hoping someone could give me a rule-of-thumb number for a simple 
distributed gluster setup, like that 85% number i've established for a 
parallel file system.

so at the moment my takeaway is, in a simple distributed volume across 3 
bricks with an aggregated bandwidth of 6GB/s i can expect to get about 
3GB/s aggregated bandwith out of the gluster mount, given there are no 
bottle necks in the network. the 3GB/s is a number conducted under ideal 
circumstances, meaning, i primed the storage to make sure i could run a 
benchmark run using three nodes, with each node running a single thread 
writing to a single file and each file was located on another bricke. 
this yielded the maximum perfomance as this was pure streaming IO 
without any overlapping file writing to the bricks other than the 
overhead created by gluster's own internal mechanisms.

Interestingly, the performance didn't drop much when i added nodes and 
threads and introduced more random-ish io by having several processes 
write to the same brick. So I assume, what "eats" up the 50% performance 
in the end is probably Gluster writing all these additional hidden files 
which I assume is some sort of Metadata. This causes additional IO on 
the disk that i'm streaming my one file to and therefore turns my 
streaming IO into a random io load for the raid controller and 
underlying harddisks which on spinning disks would have about the 
performance impact i was seing in my benchmarks.

I have yet to try gluster on a Flash based brick and test its 
performance there.. i would expect to see a better "efficiency" than the 
50% i've measured on this system here as random io vs. streaming io 
should not make such a difference (or acutally almost no difference at 
all) on a flash based storage. but that's  me guessing now.

so for the moment i'm fine but i would still be interested in hearing 
ball-park figure "efficiency" numbers from others using gluster in a 
similar setup.

cheers

Pascal

On 01.05.19 14:55, Amar Tumballi Suryanarayan wrote:
> Hi Pascal,
>
> Sorry for complete delay in this one. And thanks for testing out in 
> different scenarios.  Few questions before others can have a look and 
> advice you.
>
> 1. What is the volume info output ?
>
> 2. Do you see any concerning logs in glusterfs log files?
>
> 3. Please use `gluster volume profile` while running the tests, and 
> that gives a lot of information.
>
> 4. Considering you are using glusterfs-6.0, please take statedump of 
> client process (on any node) before and after the test, so we can 
> analyze the latency information of each translators.
>
> With these information, I hope we will be in a better state to answer 
> the questions.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 3:45 PM Pascal Suter <pascal.suter at dalco.ch 
> <mailto:pascal.suter at dalco.ch>> wrote:
>
>     i continued my testing with 5 clients, all attached over 100Gbit/s
>     omni-path via IP over IB. when i run the same iozone benchmark across
>     all 5 clients where gluster is mounted using the glusterfs client,
>     i get
>     an aggretated write throughput of only about 400GB/s and an
>     aggregated
>     read throughput of 1.5GB/s. Each node was writing a single 200Gb
>     file in
>     16MB chunks and the files where distributed across all three
>     bricks on
>     the server.
>
>     the connection was established over Omnipath for sure, as there is no
>     other link between the nodes and server.
>
>     i have no clue what i'm doing wrong here. i can't believe that
>     this is a
>     normal performance people would expect to see from gluster. i guess
>     nobody would be using it if it was this slow.
>
>     again, when written dreictly to the xfs filesystem on the bricks,
>     i get
>     over 6GB/s read and write throughput using the same benchmark.
>
>     any advise is appreciated
>
>     cheers
>
>     Pascal
>
>     On 04.04.19 12:03, Pascal Suter wrote:
>     > I just noticed i left the most important parameters out :)
>     >
>     > here's the write command with filesize and recordsize in it as
>     well :)
>     >
>     > ./iozone -i 0 -t 1 -F /mnt/gluster/storage/thread1 -+n -c -C -e
>     -I -w
>     > -+S 0 -s 200G -r 16384k
>     >
>     > also i ran the benchmark without direct_io which resulted in an
>     even
>     > worse performance.
>     >
>     > i also tried to mount the gluster volume via nfs-ganesha which
>     further
>     > reduced throughput down to about 450MB/s
>     >
>     > if i run the iozone benchmark with 3 threads writing to all three
>     > bricks directly (from the xfs filesystem) i get throughputs of
>     around
>     > 6GB/s .. if I run the same benchmark through gluster mounted
>     locally
>     > using the fuse client and with enough threads so that each brick
>     gets
>     > at least one file written to it, i end up seing throughputs around
>     > 1.5GB/s .. that's a 4x decrease in performance. at it actually
>     is the
>     > same if i run the benchmark with less threads and files only get
>     > written to two out of three bricks.
>     >
>     > cpu load on the server is around 25% by the way, nicely distributed
>     > across all available cores.
>     >
>     > i can't believe that gluster should really be so slow and
>     everybody is
>     > just happily using it. any hints on what i'm doing wrong are very
>     > welcome.
>     >
>     > i'm using gluster 6.0 by the way.
>     >
>     > regards
>     >
>     > Pascal
>     >
>     > On 03.04.19 12:28, Pascal Suter wrote:
>     >> Hi all
>     >>
>     >> I am currently testing gluster on a single server. I have three
>     >> bricks, each a hardware RAID6 volume with thin provisioned LVM
>     that
>     >> was aligned to the RAID and then formatted with xfs.
>     >>
>     >> i've created a distributed volume so that entire files get
>     >> distributed across my three bricks.
>     >>
>     >> first I ran a iozone benchmark across each brick testing the
>     read and
>     >> write perofrmance of a single large file per brick
>     >>
>     >> i then mounted my gluster volume locally and ran another iozone
>     run
>     >> with the same parameters writing a single file. the file went to
>     >> brick 1 which, when used driectly, would write with 2.3GB/s and
>     read
>     >> with 1.5GB/s. however, through gluster i got only 800MB/s read and
>     >> 750MB/s write throughput
>     >>
>     >> another run with two processes each writing a file, where one file
>     >> went to the first brick and the other file to the second brick
>     (which
>     >> by itself when directly accessed wrote at 2.8GB/s and read at
>     >> 2.7GB/s) resulted in 1.2GB/s of aggregated write and also
>     aggregated
>     >> read throughput.
>     >>
>     >> Is this a normal performance i can expect out of a glusterfs or
>     is it
>     >> worth tuning in order to really get closer to the actual brick
>     >> filesystem performance?
>     >>
>     >> here are the iozone commands i use for writing and reading.. note
>     >> that i am using directIO in order to make sure i don't get
>     fooled by
>     >> cache :)
>     >>
>     >> ./iozone -i 0 -t 1 -F /mnt/brick${b}/thread1 -+n -c -C -e -I -w
>     -+S 0
>     >> -s $filesize -r $recordsize > iozone-brick${b}-write.txt
>     >>
>     >> ./iozone -i 1 -t 1 -F /mnt/brick${b}/thread1 -+n -c -C -e -I -w
>     -+S 0
>     >> -s $filesize -r $recordsize > iozone-brick${b}-read.txt
>     >>
>     >> cheers
>     >>
>     >> Pascal
>     >>
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>
> -- 
> Amar Tumballi (amarts)
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