Jim Mauro wrote:

Could be NFS synchronous semantics on file create (followed by repeated flushing of the write cache). What kind of storage are you using (feel free to send privately if you need to) - is it a thumper?

It's not clear why NFS-enforced synchronous semantics would induce different behavior than the same
load to a local ZFS.

Actually i forgot he had 'zil_disable' turned on, so it won't matter in this case.

The big difference is that the NFS server does a VOP_FSYNC on each file create as it needs to guarantee that the changes are on stable storage. Locally, we don't need that same guarantee so you don't have to wait for a disk I/O to complete on each create.

eric


File creates are metadata intensive, right? And these operations need to be synchronous to guarantee
file system consistency (yes, I am familiar with the ZFS COW model).

Anyway....I'm feeling rather naive' here, but I've seen the "NFS enforced synchronous semantics" phrase kicked around many times as the explanation for suboptimal performance for metadata-intensive operations when ZFS is the underlying file system, but I never really understood what's "unsynchronous"
about doing the same thing to a local ZFS.

And yes, there is certainly a network latency component to the NFS configuration, so for any synchronous operation, I would expect things to be slower when done over NFS.

Awaiting enlightment....

:^)

/jim


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