Client performance questions

Client performance questions

[Fredrik Lindgren]

Hello

We have a mail-application running on a set of Linux machines using NFS
for the storage. Recently iowait on the machines has started to become
a problem, and it seems that they can't quite keep up. Iowait figures of
50% or above are not uncommon during peak hours.

What I'd like to know if there is something we could do to makes things
run smoother or if we've hit some performance cap and adding more machines
is the best answer.

>From what we can tell the NFS server doesn't seem to be the bottleneck.
The performance metrics say it's fine and we've run tests from other clients
during both on and off hours seeing almost the same results regardless.
The server(s) is a BlueArc cluster.

The clients are quad 2,2Ghz Opteron machines running Linux kernel 2.6.18.3,
except one which is on 2.6.23.9 since today.

Mount options on the clients are as follows:
bg,intr,timeo=600,retrans=2,vers=3,proto=tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768

MTU is 9000 bytes and they're all in the same Gigabit Ethernet switch along
with the NFS server.

Each client seems to be doing somewhere around 3500 NFS ops/s during peak hours.
Average read/write size seems to be around 16kb, although these operations make
up just ~30% of the activity.

This is from the 2.6.23.9 client:
Client nfs v3:
null         getattr      setattr      lookup       access       readlink
0         0% 11020402 20% 2823881   5% 7708643  14% 13259044 24% 20        0%
read         write        create       mkdir        symlink      mknod
8693411  16% 6750099  12% 3107      0% 120       0% 0         0% 0         0%
remove       rmdir        rename       link         readdir      readdirplus
1729      0% 0         0% 1558      0% 0         0% 7         0% 2738003   5%
fsstat       fsinfo       pathconf     commit
74550     0% 40        0% 0         0% 0         0%

This is from a 2.6.18.3 one:
Client nfs v3:
null         getattr      setattr      lookup       access       readlink
0         0% 2147483647 23% 495517229  5% 1234824013 13% 2147483647 23% 22972     0%
read         write        create       mkdir        symlink      mknod
1505525496 16% 1095925729 12% 492815    0% 14863     0% 0         0% 0         0%
remove       rmdir        rename       link         readdir      readdirplus
206499    0% 67        0% 273202    0% 0         0% 324       0% 447735359  4%
fsstat       fsinfo       pathconf     commit
31254030  0% 18        0% 0         0% 0         0%

10:37:03 PM  CPU   %user   %nice %system %iowait    %irq   %soft   %idle    intr/s
10:37:08 PM  all   15.72    0.00    9.68   57.49    0.15    2.15   14.82   7671.80
10:37:08 PM    0   16.40    0.00    8.20   61.60    0.00    1.80   12.00   1736.40
10:37:08 PM    1   13.80    0.00    9.60   51.40    0.20    2.00   23.00   1503.00
10:37:08 PM    2   17.40    0.00   10.20   63.40    0.20    2.60    6.20   2424.00
10:37:08 PM    3   15.20    0.00   10.60   53.80    0.20    2.40   18.20   2008.00

Is this the level of performance that could be expected from these machines?
Any suggestions on what to change to squeeze some more performance from them?

Regards,
  Fredrik Lindgren

Re: Client performance questions

[Trond Myklebust]

On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 22:52 +0100, Fredrik Lindgren wrote:
> Hello
> 
> We have a mail-application running on a set of Linux machines using NFS
> for the storage. Recently iowait on the machines has started to become
> a problem, and it seems that they can't quite keep up. Iowait figures of
> 50% or above are not uncommon during peak hours.

Have you tried increasing the value
in /proc/sys/fs/nfs/nfs_congestion_kb ?

Cheers
  Trond

Re: Client performance questions

[Jeff Layton]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:52:51 +0100
"Fredrik Lindgren" <fli-FpffG6+3qsA@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> We have a mail-application running on a set of Linux machines using
> NFS for the storage. Recently iowait on the machines has started to
> become a problem, and it seems that they can't quite keep up. Iowait
> figures of 50% or above are not uncommon during peak hours.
> 

High iowait numbers are not a problem in and of themselves. A high
iowait number is just indicative that the machine is spending a lot of
its time waiting for I/O. On a busy NFS client, that may be expected
particularly if the machine isn't doing much else CPU-wise.

The big question is whether you're getting enough throughput for your
applications. iowait percentages can't tell you that. That's not to say
that you don't have a performance issue, but you'll probably need to
get some better metrics than iowait figures to track it down.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>

Re: Client performance questions

[Aaron Wiebe]

Greetings - we also run mail on NFS.

On Dec 10, 2007 4:52 PM, Fredrik Lindgren <fli-FpffG6+3qsA@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Mount options on the clients are as follows:
> bg,intr,timeo=600,retrans=2,vers=3,proto=tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768
>
> MTU is 9000 bytes and they're all in the same Gigabit Ethernet switch along
> with the NFS server.
>
> Each client seems to be doing somewhere around 3500 NFS ops/s during peak hours.
> Average read/write size seems to be around 16kb, although these operations make
> up just ~30% of the activity.

This suggestion may get some controversy here - however it is what we
have done and its made a difference.

Try switching to UDP.  We've found that with mail applications, a
large amount of the transactions are small, and the windowing of TCP
actually slows things down.  This is what we use for mount options:

rw,v3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,acregmin=15,acregmax=120,acdirmin=45,acdirmax=120,hard,lock,proto=udp

With a 9000 byte jumbo frame, this will restrict every datagram into a
single frame - also, you may want to play with sysctl
sunrpc.udp_slot_table_entries.  We keep this at 32., but it can go
right up to 128.

In our case, our issues with this config are nearly exclusively in
keeping our server side storage fast and responsive.

-Aaron

Re: Client performance questions

[Chuck Lever]

On Dec 11, 2007, at 10:37 AM, Aaron Wiebe wrote:
> Greetings - we also run mail on NFS.
>
> On Dec 10, 2007 4:52 PM, Fredrik Lindgren <fli-FpffG6+3qsA@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>> Mount options on the clients are as follows:
>> bg,intr,timeo=600,retrans=2,vers=3,proto=tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768
>>
>> MTU is 9000 bytes and they're all in the same Gigabit Ethernet  
>> switch along
>> with the NFS server.
>>
>> Each client seems to be doing somewhere around 3500 NFS ops/s  
>> during peak hours.
>> Average read/write size seems to be around 16kb, although these  
>> operations make
>> up just ~30% of the activity.
>
> This suggestion may get some controversy here - however it is what we
> have done and its made a difference.

Although TCP is generally our recommendation, your settings are  
reasonable.  I would complain only if you were using "soft" !  :-)

> Try switching to UDP.  We've found that with mail applications, a
> large amount of the transactions are small, and the windowing of TCP
> actually slows things down.

If windowing is a problem, have you tried boosting the default size  
of the socket send and receive buffers on both ends?

>   This is what we use for mount options:
>
> rw,v3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,acregmin=15,acregmax=120,acdirmin=45,acdir 
> max=120,hard,lock,proto=udp
>
> With a 9000 byte jumbo frame, this will restrict every datagram into a
> single frame

Disclaimer: kids, if you try this at home, it will work well as long  
as the network links between your client and server all run at the  
same speed (ie. it will not work well if you have for example 100Mb  
connections from client to switch and GbE from switch to server).

> - also, you may want to play with sysctl
> sunrpc.udp_slot_table_entries.  We keep this at 32., but it can go
> right up to 128.
>
> In our case, our issues with this config are nearly exclusively in
> keeping our server side storage fast and responsive.

--
Chuck Lever
chuck[dot]lever[at]oracle[dot]com

Re: Client performance questions

[Aaron Wiebe]

Afternoon..

On Dec 11, 2007 12:03 PM, Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com> wrote:
>
> If windowing is a problem, have you tried boosting the default size
> of the socket send and receive buffers on both ends?

I believe we tweaked that on the client side at one point, but our
issues with the current settings puts most of the problems on the
storage side at present.  We've shifted our concentration mostly
towards getting our storage itself performing better, rather than
getting client throughput higher so we can crush our storage even
more.  But since these things tend to be cyclical, I'll keep it in
mind for when our bottleneck shifts back again. :)

-Aaron

Re: Client performance questions

[Orion Poplawski]

Trond Myklebust wrote:
> 
> Have you tried increasing the value
> in /proc/sys/fs/nfs/nfs_congestion_kb ?

Well, I just came across this message while trying to improve NFS 
performance locally.  On my F8 client, it is set to 30400 by default. 
Changing to 60800 kills performance.  Writes go from ~20MB/s to ~5MB/s, 
reads from ~80MB/s to ~47MB/s as measured by bonnie++.

Expected?


-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA/CoRA Division                    FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                  orion@cora.nwra.com
Boulder, CO 80301              http://www.cora.nwra.com

Re: Client performance questions

[Trond Myklebust]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 17:07 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> Trond Myklebust wrote:
> > 
> > Have you tried increasing the value
> > in /proc/sys/fs/nfs/nfs_congestion_kb ?
> 
> Well, I just came across this message while trying to improve NFS 
> performance locally.  On my F8 client, it is set to 30400 by default. 
> Changing to 60800 kills performance.  Writes go from ~20MB/s to ~5MB/s, 
> reads from ~80MB/s to ~47MB/s as measured by bonnie++.
> 
> Expected?

UDP? If so, then possibly yes. UDP has lousy congestion control, so if
the server gets too busy to respond, then performance dies.

Trond

Re: Client performance questions

[Orion Poplawski]

Trond Myklebust wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 17:07 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>> Trond Myklebust wrote:
>>> Have you tried increasing the value
>>> in /proc/sys/fs/nfs/nfs_congestion_kb ?
>> Well, I just came across this message while trying to improve NFS 
>> performance locally.  On my F8 client, it is set to 30400 by default. 
>> Changing to 60800 kills performance.  Writes go from ~20MB/s to ~5MB/s, 
>> reads from ~80MB/s to ~47MB/s as measured by bonnie++.
>>
>> Expected?
> 
> UDP? If so, then possibly yes. UDP has lousy congestion control, so if
> the server gets too busy to respond, then performance dies.

Nope, TCP.  w/rsize is 32k.  Server is pretty lightly loaded.  Server is 
RHEL4.5.


-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA/CoRA Division                    FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                  orion@cora.nwra.com
Boulder, CO 80301              http://www.cora.nwra.com