Your email explains a fair amount and here are two reasons contributing to
this.  

One is the mdc semaphore - our clients are effectively single threading
metadata updates - it will be a little while before we get to this, it is
not that hard.

The second is that many operations (but not the most critical
open/create/read/write) have too many RPC's - this one we have a good plan
for, and I think it might be fixed quite soon. 

Thanks!

- Peter -

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jean-Marc Saffroy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 9:59 AM
> To: Peter J. Braam
> Cc: 'Andreas Dilger'; 'Lin Shen (lshen)'; 'Lustre User 
> Discussion Mailing List'
> Subject: RE: [Lustre-discuss] Lustre Lite
> 
> On Sat, 4 Nov 2006, Peter J. Braam wrote:
> 
> > Do you have a test on which NFS performs much better.  We'd like to 
> > know more about that.
> 
> One test I can mention is postmark, originally written by 
> Netapp folks, now available from Debian:
>    http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/postmark
> 
> In the test, postmark was configured to perform 10k 
> "transactions" on 10k files between 500B and 22kB.
> 
> This was run with up to 16 processes on *one* client 
> connecting to various server configs on several interconnects 
> and storage systems, running 1.4.6 and 1.6beta4.
> 
> For convenience, I wrote the attached wrapper script:
>   $ ssh $client postmark.sh -n 10000 -t 10000 -j $numprocs > $log
> 
> The metric was the number of transactions per second (sum of 
> column 3 across all lines of $log). NFS reached 800-1000 t/s 
> with 2-8 processes (then performance dropped) over GigE, 
> while Lustre peaked at 200 t/s with
> 2 process on a tiny GigE cluster (1 MDS, 1 OSS serving 1 
> OST). A bigger cluster could not give more than 900 t/s.
> 
> Back then I suspected that the test was probably network 
> bound (because of high interrupt and packet rates vs. low CPU 
> and disk usage), but I could not find a good measurement. A 
> tool showing metadata RPC statistics (such as LMT maybe, but 
> I didn't know it then) would have been useful.
> 
> > If you go bak on this list, you will see that Lustre can handsomely 
> > beat NFS at unpacking archives, for example.  So I am curious.
> 
> I suppose you refer to the thread "I/O performance on small 
> files" (end of June). IIRC the recipes mentioned there had 
> been used in the tests.
> 
> Now I no longer have time to spend on these issues, but ideas 
> for improvement would still be interesting.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jean-Marc Saffroy - [EMAIL PROTECTED]

_______________________________________________
Lustre-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.clusterfs.com/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss

Reply via email to