Re: How to build a big file server

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Heinz-Josef Claes wrote:

>Am Don, 2003-06-05 um 11.04 schrieb Oleg Drokin:
>  
>
>>Hello!
>>
>>On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:50:15AM +0200, Heinz-Josef Claes wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>>>My guess is that the writes to the journal _would_ be a problem, and
>>>>>that writing them to a seperate (RAID1)-device would help significantly.
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>And with journal on battery-backed RAM it would be even faster ;)
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>The target is to have a cheep solution :/
>>>      
>>>
>>The cheapest solution to get speed is to put journal and all data on ramdisk
>>(or even into ramfs).
>>This is not the safest one, though.
>>
>>    
>>
>Perhaps this is a good idea. I'll try to test the performance. Since the
>servers are only used for an (additional) online backup (like
>snapshots), there will not be really critical data on them. I'll see if
>the performance win is worth the risk :-)
>
This sounds like a bad idea to me.  If you want to gain performance, 
don't do raid 5, or use a controller with a writeback cache.  Frankly I 
doubt you will be disk performance bound anyway.

>
>BTW: Some weeks ago there where questions about the performance of
>NetApp. I think I will have the possibility to repeat the tests with a
>filer. I'll post the results to the list, if somebody is interested.
>  
>
>>Bye,
>>    Oleg
>>
>>    
>>
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>  
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-- 
Hans