[DRBD-user] DRBD fsync() seems to return before writing to disk

Shaun Thomas sthomas at optionshouse.com
Wed Jun 20 22:48:01 CEST 2012

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


On 06/20/2012 02:34 PM, Phil Frost wrote:

> What OS and kernel version are you running? Also, when you say slower
> with both nodes present, is it slower enough to indicate that fsync
> is working?

They're old CentOS boxes running 2.6.18. So far as the latency, I'm not 
sure, but I doubt it's responsible; we have a direct 10G link between 
the two machines. For what it's worth, we are running XFS, so it's not a 
very good comparison. I don't use EXT4 in production environments.

> In the case of small synchronous writes, I'd expect any difference in
> latency to be indistinguishable from measurement error.

FusionIO drives here. Our PostgreSQL sync calls, based on checkpoint 
logging, are almost 2x slower with a connected DRBD resource, than when 
it's in standalone. About what you'd expect, actually.

We have a test cluster on a simple RAID0 with much newer OS running a 
3.2 kernel, too. That's where I noticed a Pacemaker failover would 
attempt to start the LVM service before DRBD was done promoting during a 
manual failover. I had to add a 2-second start delay, which tells me the 
DRBD RA is not waiting long enough before returning control to 
Pacemaker. I suppose that could be sync related, but I haven't run any 
specific tests.

> For that matter, is anyone absolutely sure that fsync is working on
> their DRBD devices?

I can confirm it works in our existing setup. We run a 10ktps OLTP 
database on Postgres and have experienced a few unplanned outages where 
we failed over to the other node. If DRBD was having trouble, we'd have 
ripped it out and bought a SAN long ago.

I haven't done enough tests in our dev environment with the updated 
kernel/DRBD to know for sure. If I have time later, I'll run a quick dd 
test.

-- 
Shaun Thomas
OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 500 | Chicago IL, 60604
312-444-8534
sthomas at optionshouse.com

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