Robert Latham wrote:
On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 07:29:16AM -0500, Phil Carns wrote:
Oh, and one other detail; the memory usage of the servers looks fine
during startup, so this doesn't appear to be a memory leak. There is
quite a bit of CPU work, but I am guessing that is just berkeley db
keeping busy in the iteration function.
How long does it take to scan 1.4 million files on startup?
==rob
That's an interesting issue :)
A few observations:
- we were looking at this on SAN; the results may be different on local
disks
- the db files are on the order of 500 MB for this particular setup
- the time to scan varies depending on if the db files are hot in the
Linux buffer cache
If we start the daemon right after killing another one that just did the
same scan, then the process is CPU intensive, but fast (about 5
seconds). If we unmount/mount the SAN between the two runs so that the
buffer cache is cleared, then it is very slow (about 5 minutes).
An interesting trick is to use dd with a healthy buffer size to read the
.db files and throw the output into /dev/null before starting the
servers. This only takes a few seconds, and makes it so that the scan
consistently finishes in just a few seconds as well. I think the reason
is just that it forces the db data into the Linux buffer cache using an
efficient access pattern so that berkeley db doesn't have to wait on
disk latency for whatever small accesses it is performing.
This seems to indicate that berkeley db's access pattern generated by
PVFS2 for this case isn't very friendly, at least to SANs that aren't
specifically tuned for it.
The 5 minute scan time is a problem, because it makes it hard to tell
when you will actually be able to mount the file system after the
daemons appear to have started. We would be happy to try out any
optimizations here :)
-Phil
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