Knew I was forgetting something, what is the value of TroveSyncData?

Michael

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Michael Moore <[email protected]> wrote:

> No doubt something is awry. Offhand I'm suspecting the network. A couple
> things that might help give a direction:
> 1) Do an end-to-end TCP test between client/server. Something like iperf or
> nuttcp should do the trick.
> 2) Check server and client ethernet ports on the switch for high error
> counts (not familiar with that switch, not sure if it's managed or not).
> Hardware (port/cable) errors should show up in the above test.
> 3) Can you mount the PVFS2 file system on the server and run some I/O tests
> (single datafile per file) to see if the network is in fact in play.
> 4) What are the number of datafiles (by default) each file you're writing
> to is using? 3?
> 5) When you watch network bandwidth and see 10 MB/s where is that? On the
> server?
> 6) What backend are you using for I/O, direct or alt-aio. Nothing really
> wrong either way, just wondering.
>
> It sounds like based on the dd output the disks are capable of more than
> you're seeing, just need to narrow down where the performance is getting
> squelched.
>
> Michael
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Jim Kusznir <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi all:
>>
>> I've got a pvfs2 install on my cluster.  I never felt it was
>> performing up to snuff, but lately it seems that things have gone way,
>> way down in total throughput and overall usability.  To the tune that
>> jobs writing out 900MB will take an extra 1-2 hours to complete due to
>> disk I/O waits.  A 2-hr job that would write about 30GB over the
>> course of the run (normally about 2hrs long) takes up to 20hrs.  Once
>> the disk I/O is cut out, it completes in 1.5-2hrs.  I've noticed
>> personally that there's up to a 5 sec lag time when I cd into
>> /mnt/pvfs2 and do an ls.  Note that all of our operations are using
>> the kernel module / mount point.  Our problems and code base do not
>> support the use of other tools (such as the pvfs2-* or the native MPI
>> libraries); its all done through the kernel module / filesystem
>> mountpoint.
>>
>> My configuration is this:  3 pvfs2 servers (Dell PowerEdge 1950's with
>> 1.6Ghz quad-core CPUs, 4GB ram, raid-0 for metadata+os on perc5i
>> card), Dell Perc6e card with hardware raid6 in two volumes: one on a
>> bunch of 750GB sata drives, and the other on its second SAS connector
>> to about 12 2tb WD drives.  The two raid volumes are lvm'ed together
>> in the OS and mounted as the pvfs2 data store.  Each server is
>> connected via ethernet to a stack of LG-errison gig-e switches
>> (stack==2 switches with 40Gbit stacking cables installed).  PVFS 2.8.2
>> used throughout the cluster on Rocks (using site-compiled pvfs, not
>> the rocks-supplied pvfs).  OSes are CentOS5-x-based (both clients and
>> servers).
>>
>> As I said, I always felt something wasn't quite right, but a few
>> months back, I performed a series of upgrades and reconfigurations on
>> the infrastructure and hardware.  Specifically, I upgraded to the
>> lg-errison switches and replaced a full 12-bay drive shelf with a
>> 24-bay one (moving all the disks through) and adding some additional
>> disks.  All three pvfs2 servers are identical in this.  At some point
>> prior to these changes, my users were able to get acceptable
>> performance from pvfs2; now they are not.  I don't have any evidence
>> pointing to the switch or to the disks.
>>
>> I can run dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1024k count=10000 and get
>> 380+MB/s locally on the pvfs server, writing to the partition on the
>> hardware raid6 card.  From a compute node, doing that for 100MB file,
>> I get 47.7MB/s to my RAID-5 NFS server on the head node, and 36.5MB/s
>> to my pvfs2 mounted share.  When I watch the network
>> bandwidth/throughput using bwm-ng, I rarely see more than 10MB/s, and
>> often its around 4MB/s with a 12-node IO-bound job running.
>>
>> I originally had the pvfs2 servers connected to the switch with dual
>> gig-e connections and using bonding (ALB) to make it more able to
>> serve multiple nodes.  I never saw anywhere close to the throughput I
>> should.  In any case, to test of that was the problem, I removed the
>> bonding and am running through a single gig-e pipe now, but
>> performance hasn't improved at all.
>>
>> I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this problem further.  Presently, the
>> cluster isn't usable for large I/O jobs, so I really have to fix this.
>>
>> --Jim
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pvfs2-users mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-users
>>
>
>
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