On 10/18/2017 02:03 PM, Markos Vakondios wrote: > Hello List, > > My use case, is to provide a large hardware-RAID backed volume (hence no > ZFS) to PVE for continuous decent performance writes by a running container > (cctv dvr). > > I have 6 x 6TB SATA drives on a hardware RAID 10 configuration. > > It 's formated as a ~10TB XFS device: > > /dev/sdb on /10TB type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,inode64,noquota) > > I created a local directory storage pool on my PVE host and assigned a > 9.8TB mount point to a running container (DVR) > > pve:/10TB/images/101# ls -lah /10TB/images/101/ > total 6.3T > drwxr----- 2 root root 30 Feb 15 2017 . > drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 38 Feb 15 2017 .. > -rw-r----- 1 root root 9.8T Oct 18 14:03 vm-101-disk-1.raw > > After a couple of months, I started receiving the following XFS errors on > the host: > > Oct 17 06:26:09 pve kernel: [5629844.259800] XFS: loop0(28500) possible > memory allocation deadlock size 72832 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2400240) > > leaving me with an unusable filesystem from inside the container (no > writes), unless I drop the host's page cache: > > echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches > > or even need to drop all pagecache, dentries and inodes: > > echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches (remember to sync first!)
I can't comment on the fragmentation issue because I am using ext4 in all my testlab machines, but if you notice improvements when forcing a cache fluche, you should use sysctl tunable to prevent page cache and dentrie/ inode to grow to much. I have seen this behaviour on Linux servers with a high amount of RAM and mechanical disks. Page cache / dentries cache go up to half of the server memory, Then it can happen that the kernel tries to reclaim 8GB or more at once, flushing all that data on the disks with the highest priority, provoking a big IO wait at the kernel level which stalls the system. To avoid this situation you can have a look https://cromwell-intl.com/linux/performance-tuning/disks.html and follow the hints for "improve latency for interactive system" for dirty_ration, dirty_background_ration, and vfs_cache_pressure The hints from this page will have the effect of making the kernel flushes often a smaller cache, increasing the reponsiveness of a system with slow hard disks. _______________________________________________ pve-user mailing list [email protected] https://pve.proxmox.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pve-user
