Re: storage controllers for use with NFS+BtrFs

[Benjamin Coddington <bcodding@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2015, Daniel Pocock wrote:

> On 20/01/15 14:25, Benjamin Coddington wrote:
> > Hi Daniel,
> >
> > On Mon, 19 Jan 2015, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> >> I've been looking into the issue of which storage controllers are
> >> suitable for use with NFS + BtrFs (or NFS + ZFS) and put some comments
> >> about it on my blog[1] today.
> >>
> >> I understand that for NFS it is generally desirable to have non-volatile
> >> write cache if you want good write performance.
> >>
> >> On the other hand, self-healing file systems (BtrFs and ZFS) like having
> >> direct access to disks and those RAID cards with caches don't always
> >> give the same level of access to the volume.
> >>
> >> Can anybody give any practical suggestions about how to reconcile these
> >> requirements and experience good NFS write performance onto these
> >> filesystems given the type of HBA and RAID cards available?
> > I don't think that reconciling these requirements is going to necessarily
> > equal good NFS write performance.  You've got to define what good means.
> > It sounds like you want fast commits, but how fast, how many, what size?
> More specific example of the use-case will probably answer that:
> - consider a home network or small office, less than 10 users
> - aim to improve the performance of tasks such as:
>   - unzipping source tarballs with many files in them
>   - switching between branches in Git when many files change
>   - compiling large projects with many object files or Java class files
> to be written
>        and/or building packages
>
> For compiling, I can obviously generate my object files on tmpfs or some
> other workaround to get performance.

It looks like you have reproduceable workload - that's going to make your
testing much easier.

> > If you're building on ZFS, best thing would be to find a very fast ZIL
> > device, but if you're already building pools on SSD to get any gain you'd
> > need something really fast like DDR.  A ramdrive ZIL might be a nice way to
> > test that on your setup before spending anything.
> >
> > Many BBU-d RAID controllers allow JBOD modes that still slice up their
> > cache for writes to disk, for example check out megacli's
> > "-CfgEachDskRaid0".
>
> Thanks for that feedback
>
> I had been using BtrFs and md at present (1TB for each) and I'm thinking
> about going up to 4TB or 6TB and deciding whether to use BtrFs or ZFS on
> most of it.

If you make discoveries, let me know what you find out.

Ben