On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 04:47:08PM +0200, Matthieu Dorier wrote:
> Hi Rob and Phil,
> 
> This thread moved to the ofs-support mailing list (probably because the first 
> personne to answer was part of this team), but I didn't get much answer to my 
> problem, so I'll try to summarize here what I have done.
> 
> First to answer Phil, here is the PVFS config file attached, and here is the 
> script file used for IOR:
> 
> IOR START
>   testFile = pvfs2:/mnt/pvfs2/testfileA
>   filePerProc=0
>   api=MPIIO
>   repetitions=100
>   verbose=2
>   blockSize=4m
>   transferSize=4m
>   collective=1
>   writeFile=1
>   interTestDelay=60
>   readFile=0
>   RUN
> IOR STOP

OH! you are already using collective i/o.  Huh.  Then I wonder what
would happen if you turned it off?

> I attach a set of graphics summarizing the experiments (on the x axis it's 
> the iteration number and on the y axis the aggregate throughput obtained for 
> this iteration, 100 consecutive iterations are performed).
> It seems that the performance follows the law D = a*T+b where D is the 
> duration of the write, T is the wallclock time since the beginning of the 
> experiment, and "a" and "b" are constants.
> 
> When I stop IOR and immediately restart it, I get the good performance back, 
> it does not continue at the reduced performance the previous instance 
> finished.

Huh. Fascinating.  Probably why no one has observed this -- typically
we benchmark PVFS by running multiple IOR instances. 

So, what could be going on at the client?    This smells like a
select() or poll() is getting ever-larger arrays of file descriptors
to manage.    What else on the client might grow or get slower over
time?    Could the ever-larger array of file descriptors have
something to do with TCP over IB?    I guess not, since you already
experimented on a pure Ethernet environment.

==rob

-- 
Rob Latham
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Lab, IL USA
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