Re: xfs: very slow after mount, very slow at umount

John Stoffel
2011-01-27T20:24:13Z

>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Lord <kernel@teksavvy.com> writes:

Mark> On 11-01-27 10:40 AM, Justin Piszcz wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Mark Lord wrote:
Mark> ..
>>> Can you recommend a good set of mkfs.xfs parameters to suit the characteristics
>>> of this system? Eg. Only a few thousand active inodes, and nearly all files are
>>> in the 600MB -> 20GB size range. The usage pattern it must handle is up to
>>> six concurrent streaming writes at the same time as up to three streaming reads,
>>> with no significant delays permitted on the reads.
>>>
>>> That's the kind of workload that I find XFS handles nicely,
>>> and EXT4 has given me trouble with in the past.
Mark> ..
>> I did a load of benchmarks a long time ago testing every mkfs.xfs option there
>> was, and I found that most of the time (if not all), the defaults were the best.
Mark> ..

Mark> I am concerned with fragmentation on the very special workload
Mark> in this case. I'd really like the 20GB files, written over a
Mark> 1-2 hour period, to consist of a very few very large extents, as
Mark> much as possible.

Mark> Rather than hundreds or thousands of "tiny" MB sized extents. I
Mark> wonder what the best mkfs.xfs parameters might be to encourage
Mark> that?

Hmmm, should the application be pre-allocating the disk space then, so
that the writes get into nice large extents automatically? Isn't this
what the fallocate() system call is for? Doesn't MythTV use this?

I don't use XFS, or MythTV, but I like keeping track of this stuff.

John