* Re: BTRFS and the steadily lit LED
2013-03-27 8:56 BTRFS and the steadily lit LED Swâmi Petaramesh
@ 2013-03-28 3:38 ` Jérôme Poulin
0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Jérôme Poulin @ 2013-03-28 3:38 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Swâmi Petaramesh; +Cc: linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:56 AM, Swâmi Petaramesh <swami@petaramesh.org> wrote:
> After having received strong advice from the people in this list to
> upgrade my kernel to the latest one, I have installed 3.8.0-14-generic
> #24-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 on several (4) machines.
>
> In the hope of improving systems speed I had also removed all snapshots
> then defragged the FSes - the snapshots have been recreated since, as I
> use the excellent SuSE "Snapper" tool.
>
> But well, all 4 machines are still slow like hell. All of them are used
> for quite basic daily tasks - web browsing, email, typical LibreOffice
> tasks, nothing very mysterious there, no specific heavy DB work.
>
> All machines have 64-bits Linuxes (either Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04ß), with
> decent amounts of RAM - 2 GB to 4 GB - and disks filled less than 75%
>
> With such a setup, I would expect any decent filesystem to deliver
> excellent performance. Still, all of my machines are slow like hell and
> I'm most of the time in mode « Working my patience while waiting for the
> HD LED to go off ».
>
> I haven't noticed any real-life noticeable improvement upgrading the
> kernels from 3.5.x to 3.8.x
>
> So I'm wondering...
I must say after having used BTRFS for quite some time on many
different desktop systems that this pretty much summaries my though of
BTRFS used on a desktop system.
I have been using it on my root filesystem for 5 consecutive systems
and all of them were I/O bound most of the time after 2 months of
normal usage with or *without* snapshots. Defragging or rebalancing
doesn't help, growing leaf size helps push back the problem, but it
eventually come back.
The only way to get around the problem is to re-format the drive and
restore from backups. I'm pretty sure I toasted 2 SSDs because of
BTRFS, one in 4 months, the other in 6 months. 80 GB SSDs, I switched
this system to NILFS2 for now, which isn't I/O bound and doesn't kill
flash drives.
A bigger system that I administer has 14 TB worth of data and has
constant loads of 6 to 8 (4 CPUs), mostly because of I/O wait just
because it unzips a file. This system never had a snapshot.
On the system I'm writing, watching a YouTube video will hang one
second every 30 seconds because flash player writes the video to /tmp.
I submitted some backtrace but lost hope, I used kernel from 3.0 to
3.9-rc4 with the FS, features are great, it is great for a file
server, but for desktop, it is really hard to use as root or /home
because of this issue.
Is there any data I can submit to help enhance performance on a desktop system?
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