On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Recent SSDs typically accumulate (coalesce) multiple writes in the
>>
>> on-board DRAM to flush these to NAND at a later time, so multiple
>> writes are hardly an issue.
>>
>
> If the SSD buffers the writes in DRAM then the postponed writes written via
> NFS COMMIT become a total non-issue.


I am hardly an authority on the subject, but in my characterization of
ZFS/NFS performance with a battery backed, RAM-based slog, I found that the
delay from pushing data across the PCI-X bus alone during COMMIT flush had a
significant impact on NFS single stream write performance.  I imagine this
delay exists to a certain degree on all interconnect
types (SATA, PCI-E, etc) even if the slog itself were infinitely fast.  In
the extreme case (say, multi-megabyte COMMITs) one can waste a good chunk of
both the bus (or slog) bandwidth and the network bandwidth--the bus/slog is
idle when the network is active, and the network is idle when the bus/slog
is active.

Whether or not it makes sense to take such aggressive measures to mask
latency in specific cases is, of course, a separate question.

Kaya
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