Dear team,
First, a thank as always for making the gluster storage solution.
The question:
Years back, when we first started using Gluster, we had a requirement to
provide NFS services. Documentation and discussions at the time made us feel as
if we should not use the kernel NFS server from a fuse mount but rather use
Ganesha. Recently I have seen people are using Linux kernel NFS server with
gluster fuse mounts. It has been working well in our test environment. What are
the drawbacks to exporting a fuse-mounted glusterfs filesystem using the Linux
NFS server?
Optional background reading for the question:
At the time, and still today, Ganesha doesn’t serve our specific workload fast
enough (no disrespect to the great people working on Ganesha). We therefore
used and continue to use Gluster NFS.
Recently, we have begun to have issues with gluster NFS mounts when the nfs
performance io cache is enabled. Files under 200M or so, in certain situations
and systems but not all systems, will get an IO error on the NFS mount. The
fuse access is fine. Turning off the cache makes the server nearly unusable for
our specific workload and scale. We may write about that separately but we’re
behind in gluster version and know we need to get current before we ask for
help.
This problem at an important site had us looking for workarounds. We are using
Ganesha as the work-around, but it is significantly slower. Internal testing
showed exporting with kernel NFS was very slick. Hence the question.
Gluster is used for several things but for NFS, it’s largely a collection of
squashfs files that represent root filesystems that is the most load.
Thank you all!!!
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