[DRBD-user] DRBD performance on a budget

Florian Haas florian.haas at linbit.com
Tue Sep 15 08:42:42 CEST 2009

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On 2009-09-15 00:48, Christian Iversen wrote:
> Hey DRBD-list
> 
> I'm trying to build a reasonably performant DRBD-minicluster (2 machines
> with heartbeat). I've got the basic setup working fine, with 2 largely
> identical servers each running a Seagate 7200.ES 500GB disk.
> 
> This is exported as a HA-NFS on top of the 500GB DRBD volume with
> internal metadata. It's used in our production system, and we're
> generally very happy with the result (failover, etc), except the
> performance leaves a bit to be desired.
> 
> I have a few questions:
> 
> 1) It really seems internal metadata is a bad idea, since it eats 2
> extra seeks per write. Is this always true, or can DRBD sometimes buffer
> these metadata-writes to minimize impact?

Can you please google 'drbd "internal metadata"' and hit "I'm Feeling
Lucky"?

> 2) Suppose write latency (related to question #1) is our biggest
> concern. We are currently using protocol C. Will protocol A or B be
> vastly different? I know there's no substitute for a proper
> benchmarking, but we are a little wary of "just testing something" on
> our production system. Does anybody have experience with this they would
> like to share?

You answered that question yourself:

> P.S: I should note that we are not willing to sacrifice data integrity
> for performance. If it seems that way from my comments about protocol
> A/B/C, let me assure you that we simply want to learn about the various
> bottlenecks in the system.

C is the *only* protocol that guarantees data integrity. Thus, A and B
are irrelevant to you.

> 
> 3) Suppose the write latency really is the biggest problem we're facing
> (we're still investigating the situation). As far as I can tell, a
> battery-backed storage controller is the way to go, since this will
> allow persistent stores to complete right away. However, this is for a
> normal server, not DRBD. How does DRBD affect this situation? Will such
> a controller even be useful at all?

Answered in the same blog post your Google search will lead you to.

Cheers,
Florian

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