On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 07:30:35PM -0600, Tim Serong wrote:
> On 3/26/2010 at 02:47 AM, Ben Timby <[email protected]> wrote: 
> > On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Serong <[email protected]> wrote: 
> > >> > Now for a little potential nastiness...  I did some work in this area 
> > >> > a year or two ago, and at the time, we ran into some curious edge 
> > >> > cases. 
> > >> > Hopefully things have moved on a little since then in NFS-land (I was 
> > >> > using SLES 10 SP2, from memory), but for reference, have a look at: 
> > >> > 
> > >> >  http://marc.info/?l=linux-nfs&m=123175640421702&w=2 
> > >> > 
> > >> > This describes an edge case where (depending on what the clients are 
> > >> > doing), it's possible that running "exportfs -i" to export one 
> > >> > directory 
> > >> > will result in an interruption of service to an unrelated exported 
> > >> > directory on the same node. 
> > >> 
> > >> I think you are advocating additional testing, I address that below... 
> > > 
> > > Yes.  But, I should probably explicitly state that the additional testing 
> > > I'm advocating is focused on testing NFS in an HA environment, i.e. these 
> > > issues (assuming they still exist) need to be resolved somewhere in the 
> > > NFS server, and are not specific to your RA.  It's just that you don't 
> > > hit 
> > > them until you try to do active/active, rather than active/passive (i.e. 
> > > start/stop entire NFS server). 
> >  
> > Actually, reading through that post, the testing I suggested is close, 
> > but not quite. The problems was explictly caused by write buffers from 
> > the client in the 32K range, as these were small enough to send a lot 
> > of them in a short amount of time, but large enough to be dropped by 
> > the NFS server rather than deferred. This was the crux of the problem. 
> > I am not sure how to get 32K writes, besides... 
> >  
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/fs0/smallfile bs=32K count=1024 
> 
>  # mount -o rsize=32768,wsize=32768 server:/dir /localdir
> 
> That specifies the maximum number of bytes for each read and write request
> over the wire.
> 
> > [...]
> > >
> > > Yep, that's the sort of test.  I'll see if I can find out anything else  
> > useful 
> > > about the tools we were using at the time (not sure if they ever got  
> > publicly 
> > > released, unfortunately :-/) 
> 
> Actually, they were, but on an "as-is" basis as tarballs, which may or
> may not require some effort to get running.  See:
> 
>   http://lwn.net/Articles/326926/
>   http://oss.sgi.com/projects/nfs/testtools/
> 
> We would have been using genstream/checkstream from a single client for
> those R/W tests.  This has the advantage over dd that you can use it
> to check for data corruption.  You may also be interested in Weber, which
> simulates multiple NFS clients.
> 
> > Any more info you can provide will be helpful. I need to get my 
> > testing done soon, as these boxes are going into production this 
> > weekend. I am way behind schedule, you would not believe how long it 
> > took me to build a 30TB array and then sync it via DRBD (4 days for 
> > Linux RAID, 10 days for DRBD). Actually, I had to split it into two 
> > volumes as the DRBD volume limit is a scant 18TB :-). 
>
> *ouch*

currently 16 TiB per drbd minor, to be exact.
if this was a new array, and you intended to mkfs /dev/drbdX anyways,
you could have skipped the initial DRBD sync, btw...


-- 
: Lars Ellenberg
: LINBIT | Your Way to High Availability
: DRBD/HA support and consulting http://www.linbit.com

DRBD® and LINBIT® are registered trademarks of LINBIT, Austria.
_______________________________________________________
Linux-HA-Dev: [email protected]
http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha-dev
Home Page: http://linux-ha.org/

Reply via email to