Re: Massive BTRFS performance degradation

Swâmi Petaramesh
2014-03-09T12:11:06Z

Le dimanche 9 mars 2014 11:33:50 Hugo Mills a écrit :
>
> ssd should be activated automatically on any non-rotational device.
> ssd_spread is generally slower on modern SSDs than the ssd option.
> discard is, except on the very latest hardware, a synchronous command
> (it's a limitation of the SATA standard), and therefore results in
> very very poor performance.

Thanks for the info Hugo :-)

> There's one known and serious bug in 3.11 before 3.11.6 which
> affects balances. Please make sure that you're running 3.11.6 or
> later. There may be other bugs in there that have been fixed in later
> kernel versions as well, but that's the "headline" one.

Latest Ubuntu / Mint now have 3.11.0-18. Anyway I don't think my "old lady
neighbour" will ever hear about balance or care, and will ever try to run it
on her laptop. She would first have to figure out what a terminal and command
line are ;-)

> We don't get many bug reports of kernel oopses in send. This may be
> that we don't have many people trying to use it (it is, after all,
> fairly deep and poorly explained magic at the moment). It may be that
> you have some corruption that's gone undetected otherwise,

Well, that's a rather "young" BTRFS setup (less than a month) that passes
scrub without detecting any error, and a plain "btrfs send" works, then an
incremental one fails...

> send code isn't handling it well. Or it may be an actual bug in send.

I would tend to believe so ;-)

> At least you've reported it. (It might also be worth putting a copy of
> the report on bugzilla.kernel.org, because then it doesn't get
> forgotten in the email noise here).

> > - btrfs-defrag.sgh hangs because of some glitch with "filefrag".
>
> Is that a btrfs problem, or a filefrag problem?

Looks like it's a filefrag problem. Looks like filefrag stalls forever trying to
figure out the fragmentation status of some files...

> btrfs-defrag.sh isn't something I've heard of before, so I'd say it's
> unlikely to be maintained by any of the main btrfs developers (and hence is
> much more likely to be unmaintained or just plain broken in general).

It's a useful script that can be found there
https://gitorious.org/btrfs-defrag
...and it's maintained by Dmitry, who's a nice, responsive and helpful guy.

> > - bedup crashes badly and looks completely unmaintained as far as I can
> > tell and nobody seems to care.
>
> That's because nobody here is connected to bedup in any way. It was
> a third-party piece of software written by someone (I don't even
> recall who) who hasn't, as far as I know, engaged with the main btrfs
> developers at all.

bedup is mentioned on the BRTFS wiki
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Deduplication
...as being the only current way to perform BTRFS deduplication. I found it in
the wiki and belived/hoped it was something more "official and maintained" that
what you seem to mean - alas...

Actually deduplication WAS the reason why I recently made the move to BTRFS
again, for deduplication in ZFS is working, but *SO* memory hungry and
performance killer unless you have *lots* of RAM...

So I wanted to give a try at BTRFS offline bedup.

> > Soooo weeelllll... Looks like readiness for prime time is still
> > ahead of us...
>
> I think that's fair to say. However, it is noticeably improving
> over time. The timescales are just quite long.

If the timescales become really too long, people with just end keeping with
the idea that BTRFS is not ready for production and won't be any previsible
time soon...

Kind regards.

--
Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> http://petaramesh.org PGP 9076E32E