Hi Denny

Thanks for the inputs.
Btw when you say you tested another case without 'fsync'; I think
you changed the file channel code to comment out 'flush' part of it.
And if we rely on OS flushing then still it can be reasonably reliable.
Is that right?

Regards,
Jagadish

On 10/22/2012 07:08 PM, Denny Ye wrote:
hi Jagadish,
I have tested performance of FileChannel recently. Here I can support the test report to you for your thinking and questions at this thread. Talking about the comparison between FileChannel and File Sink. FileChannel supports both sequential writer and random reader, there have so many times shift of magnetic head, it's slow than the sequential writing much more. 'fsync' command has consuming much time than writing, almost 100times/sec, same as number mentioned from Brock. Also, I didn't know why there have such difference between your two servers. I think it might be related with OS version (usage between fsync and fdatasync instruction) or disk driver (RAID, caching strategy, and so on). Throughput of single FileChannel is almost 3-5MB/sec in my environment. Thus I used 5 channels with 18MB/sec. It's hard to believe the linear increasing with more channels. Meanwhile, it look like the limit of throughput with 'fsync' operation. I tested another case without 'fsync' operation after each batch, almost 35-40MB/sec(Also, I removed the pre-allocation at disk writing in this case).
    Hope useful for you.

PS : I heard that OS has demon thread to flush page cache to disk asynchronously with second latency, does it's effective for amount of data with tolerant loss?

-Regards
Denny Ye

2012/10/22 Jagadish Bihani <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>

    Hi

    I am writing this on top of another thread where there was
    discussion on "fsync lies" and
    only file channel used fsync and not file sink. :

    -- I tested the fsync performance on 2 machines  (On 1 machine I
    was getting very good throughput
    using file channel and on another almost 100 times slower with
    almost same hardware configuration.)
    using following code


    #define PAGESIZE 4096

    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {

            char my_write_str[PAGESIZE];
            char my_read_str[PAGESIZE];
            char *read_filename= argv[1];
            int readfd,writefd;

            readfd = open(read_filename,O_RDONLY);
            writefd = open("written_file",O_WRONLY|O_CREAT,777);
            int len=lseek(readfd,0,2);
            lseek(readfd,0,0);
            int iterations = len/PAGESIZE;
            int i;
            struct timeval t0,t1;

           for(i=0;i<iterations;i++)
            {

                    read(readfd,my_read_str,PAGESIZE);
                    write(writefd,my_read_str,PAGESIZE);
    *gettimeofday(&t0,0);**
    **                fsync(writefd);**
    **              gettimeofday(&t1,0);*
                    long elapsed = (t1.tv_sec-t0.tv_sec)*1000000 +
    t1.tv_usec-t0.tv_usec;
                    printf("Elapsed time is= %ld \n",elapsed);
             }
            close(readfd);
            close(writefd);
    }


    -- As expected it requires typically 50000 microseconds for fsync
    to complete on one machine and 200 microseconds
    on another machine it took 290 microseconds to complete on an
    average. So is machine with higher
    performance is doing a 'fsync lie'?
    i
    -- If I have understood it clearly; "fsync lie" means the data is
    not actually written to disk and it is in
    some disk/controller buffer.  I) Now if disk loses power due to
    some shutdown or any other disaster, data will
    be lost. II) Can data be lost even without it ? (e.g. if it is
    keeping data in some disk buffer and if fsync is being
    invoked continuously then will that data can also  be lost? If
    only part -I is true; then it can be acceptable
    because probability of shutdown is usually less in production
    environment. But if even II is true then there is a
    problem.

    -- But on the machine where disk doesn't lie performance of flume
    using File channel is very low (I have seen it
    maximum 100 KB/sec even with sufficient  DirectMemory allocation.)
    Does anybody have stats about throughput
    of file channel ? Is anybody getting better performance with file
    channel (without fsync lies). What is the recommended
    usage of it for an average scenario ? (Transferring files of few
    MBs to HDFS sink continuously on typical hardware
    (16 core processors, 16 GB RAM etc.)


    Regards,
    Jagadish

    On 10/10/2012 11:30 PM, Brock Noland wrote:
    Hi,

    On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 11:22 AM, Jagadish Bihani
    <[email protected]>  <mailto:[email protected]>  
wrote:
    Hi Brock

    I will surely look into 'fsync lies'.

    But as per my experiments I think "file channel" is causing the issue.
    Because on those 2 machines (one with higher throughput and other with
    lower)
    I did following experiment:

    cat Source -memory channel - file sink.

    Now with this setup I got same throughput on both the machines. (around 3
    MB/sec)
    Now as I have used "File sink" it should also do "fsync" at some point of
    time.
    'File Sink' and 'File Channel' both do disk writes.
    So if there is differences in disk behaviour then even in the 'File Sink' it
    should be visible.

    Am I missing something here?
    File sink does not call fsync.

    Regards,
    Jagadish



    On 10/10/2012 09:35 PM, Brock Noland wrote:
    OK your disk that is giving you 40KB/second is telling you the truth
    and the faster disk is lying to you. Look up "fsync lies" to see what
    I am referring to.

    A spinning disk can do 100 fsync operations per second (this is done
    at the end of every batch). That is how I estimated your event size,
    40KB/second is doing 40KB / 100 =  409 bytes.

    Once again, if you want increased performance, you should increase the
    batch size.

    Brock

    On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Jagadish Bihani
    <[email protected]>  <mailto:[email protected]>  
wrote:
    Hi

    Yes. It is around 480 - 500 bytes.


    On 10/10/2012 09:24 PM, Brock Noland wrote:
    How big are your events? Average about 400 bytes?

    Brock

    On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Jagadish Bihani
    <[email protected]>  <mailto:[email protected]>  
wrote:
    Hi

    Thanks for the inputs Brock. After doing several experiments
    eventually problem boiled down to disks.

        -- But I had used the same configuration (so all software components
    are
    same in all 3 machines)
    on all 3 machines.
    -- In User guide it is written that if multiple file channel instances
    are
    active on the same agent then
    different disks are preferable. But in my case only one file channel is
    active per agent.
    -- Only one pattern I observed that on the machines where I got better
    performance have multiple disks.
    But I don't understand how that will help if I have only 1 active file
    channel.
    -- What is the impact of the type of disk/disk device driver on
    performance?
    I mean I don't understand
    with 1 disk I am getting 40 KB/sec and with other 2 MB/sec.

    Could you please elaborate on File channel and disks correlation.

    Regards,
    Jagadish


    On 10/09/2012 08:01 PM, Brock Noland wrote:

    Hi,

    Using file channel, in terms of performance, the number and type of
    disks is going to be much more predictive of performance than CPU or
    RAM. Note that consumer level drives/controllers will give you much
    "better" performance because they lie to you about when your data is
    actually written to the drive. If you search for "fsync lies" you'll
    find more information on this.

    You probably want to increase the batch size to get better performance.

    Brock

    On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Jagadish Bihani
    <[email protected]>  <mailto:[email protected]>  
wrote:

    Hi

    My flume setup is:

    Source Agent : cat source - File Channel - Avro Sink
    Dest Agent :     avro source - File Channel - HDFS Sink.

    There is only 1 source agent and 1 destination agent.

    I measure throughput as amount of data written to HDFS per second.
    ( I have rolling interval 30 sec; so If 60 MB file is generated in 30
    sec
    the
    throughput is : -- 2 MB/sec ).

    I have run source agent on various machines with different hardware
    configurations :
    (In all cases I run flume agent with JAVA OPTIONS as
    "-DJAVA_OPTS="-Xms500m -Xmx1g -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
    -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=2g")

    JDK is 32 bit.

    Experiment 1:
    =====
    RAM : 16 GB
    Processor: Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40 GHz (16 cores).
    64 bit Processor with 64 bit Kernel.
    Throughput: 2 MB/sec

    Experiment 2:
    ======
    RAM : 4 GB
    Processor: Intel Xeon E5504  @ 2.00GHz (4 cores). 32 bit Processor
    64 bit Processor with 32 bit Kernel.
    Throughput : 30 KB/sec

    Experiment 3:
    ======
    RAM : 8 GB
    Processor:Intel Xeon E5520 @ 2.27 GHz (16 cores).32 bit Processor
    64 bit Processor with 32 bit Kernel.
    Throughput : 80 KB/sec

        -- So as can be seen there is huge difference in the throughput with
    same
    configuration but
    different hardware.
    -- In the first case where throughput is more RES is around 160 MB in
    other
    cases it is in
    the range of 40 MB - 50 MB.

    Can anybody please give insights that why there is this huge difference
    in
    the throughput?
    What is the correlation between RAM and filechannel/HDFS sink
    performance
    and also
    with 32-bit/64 bit kernel?

    Regards,
    Jagadish






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