+1 for "no-rewinddir-support" option in DHT.
We are seeing very slow directory listing specially with 1500+ brick
volume, 'ls' takes 20+ second with 1000+ files.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 7:08 AM, Raghavendra Gowdappa
<rgowd...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Keiviw" <kei...@163.com>
>> To: gluster-devel@gluster.org
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 12:41:02 PM
>> Subject: [Gluster-devel] A question of GlusterFS dentries!
>>
>> Hi,
>> In GlusterFS distributed volumes, listing a non-empty directory was slow.
>> Then I read the dht codes and found the reasons. But I was confused that
>> GlusterFS dht travesed all the bricks(in the volume) sequentially,why not
>> use multi-thread to read dentries from multiple bricks simultaneously.
>> That's a question that's always puzzled me, Couly you please tell me
>> something about this???
>
> readdir across subvols is sequential mostly because we have to support 
> rewinddir(3). We need to maintain the mapping of offset and dentry across 
> multiple invocations of readdir. In other words if someone did a rewinddir to 
> an offset corresponding to earlier dentry, subsequent readdirs should return 
> same set of dentries what the earlier invocation of readdir returned. For 
> example, in an hypothetical scenario, readdir returned following dentries:
>
> 1. a, off=10
> 2. b, off=2
> 3. c, off=5
> 4. d, off=15
> 5. e, off=17
> 6. f, off=13
>
> Now if we did rewinddir to off 5 and issue readdir again we should get 
> following dentries:
> (c, off=5), (d, off=15), (e, off=17), (f, off=13)
>
> Within a subvol backend filesystem provides rewinddir guarantee for the 
> dentries present on that subvol. However, across subvols it is the 
> responsibility of DHT to provide the above guarantee. Which means we 
> should've some well defined order in which we send readdir calls (Note that 
> order is not well defined if we do a parallel readdir across all subvols). 
> So, DHT has sequential readdir which is a well defined order of reading 
> dentries.
>
> To give an example if we have another subvol - subvol2 - (in addiction to the 
> subvol above - say subvol1) with following listing:
> 1. g, off=16
> 2. h, off=20
> 3. i, off=3
> 4. j, off=19
>
> With parallel readdir we can have many ordering like - (a, b, g, h, i, c, d, 
> e, f, j), (g, h, a, b, c, i, j, d, e, f) etc. Now if we do (with readdir done 
> parallely):
>
> 1. A complete listing of the directory (which can be any one of 10P1 = 10 
> ways - I hope math is correct here).
> 2. Do rewinddir (20)
>
> We cannot predict what are the set of dentries that come _after_ offset 20. 
> However, if we do a readdir sequentially across subvols there is only one 
> directory listing i.e, (a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j). So, its easier to 
> support rewinddir.
>
> If there is no POSIX requirement for rewinddir support, I think a parallel 
> readdir can easily be implemented (which improves performance too). But 
> unfortunately rewinddir is still a POSIX requirement. This also opens up 
> another possibility of a "no-rewinddir-support" option in DHT, which if 
> enabled results in parallel readdirs across subvols. What I am not sure is 
> how many users still use rewinddir? If there is a critical mass which wants 
> performance with a tradeoff of no rewinddir support this can be a good 
> feature.
>
> +gluster-users to get an opinion on this.
>
> regards,
> Raghavendra
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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