Hi,

after the problem with the wiki was solved, i added a summery about
CyrusCluster http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Cyrus/CyrusCluster .
Please feel free to add infos about your experience with NFS

Quoting Paul Dekkers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

Hi,

Took me a while before I found the time to try the meta-partitions and
NFS backed (data-)partitions, but:

Dmitriy Kirhlarov wrote:
On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 05:08:52PM +0200, Paul Dekkers wrote:

I recently tried to use NFS (on a RedHat client, both to a NetApp filer
as well as a RedHat NFS server) and I'll share my experiences:

Michael Menge wrote:

Cyrus has 2 problems with NFS.

1. Cyrus depends on filesystem locking. NFS-4 should have solved this
problem
but i have not tested it.

2. BerkleyDB uses shared Memory which does not work accros multiple
servers.

I used skiplist in the tests (default with Simon's RPM), and initially
just used NFSv3 (and I also tested NFSv4): as long as I mounted with the
-o nolock option it actually worked quite well (also on NFSv3). The
performance was even better with the NetApp as target than with a local
filesystem (and NFSv3 was faster than v4).

The nolock options does not disable locking (as I understand it) for the
filesystem, it just disables locking over NFS, so other nodes won't have
the same file locked. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) My intention was not to
have an active-active setup, so in that regard this might not be that
bad. Not sure what other catches there are though.


Are you try metapartition* options? If you don't need active-active
setup it can be useful.


I didn't try metapartitions with my "-o nolock" experiment (which of
course doesn't work with active-active either), but now I did another
experiment with regular NFS locking (no special mount-options) and a
metapartition for every type of metadata (metapartition_files: header
index cache expunge squat).

I'm glad to say that this seems to work quite well! Similar to the "-o
nolock", actually, but it sounds more solid without the "tweaking".
We use NetApp as NFS filer, and it actually seems to perform a bit
better than our (this) internal RAID5, load is similar, ... and
fortunally no errors from the imaptest.

It sounds like this could work. But I'm not sure about the Cyrus
internals if there are any catches; Ken (or someone else), could this be
considered safe? If it is safe, I'd prefer to use NFS because
performance is similar (or better) and the filers are more reliable than
our RAID5 setup. (I won't go into details, but it's basically a
physically separated RAID-1 set of drives in RAID-6-ish.)

(Performance-wise I only tried small folders, but as soon as the
metadata is cached, I think there a not a lot of directory reads when a
folder is opened, so that doesn't really matter... right?)

I stressed the setup with the imaptest tool from Dovecot, I saw problems
with that in the past (also with NFSv3 and v4, but in combination with
Cyrus 2.2 and I'm not sure if I tried nolock), now it seemed to do just
fine. Only NFSv4 does not seem to be the answer, it seems that -o nolock
is (on Linux as client).

I'm very hesitant to put this into production, I just wanted to do some
more tests and ask others after that if they think this is wise or
not... I couldn't find the time to do more tests... (like see how RedHat
5 behaves instead of RedHat 4, if the tric also works on FreeBSD, if I
can make it fail one way or another... suggestions always welcome...)


I still have to try how RedHat 5 and FreeBSD behave,

Paul

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