[DRBD-user] external metadata on ssd vs bcache

Holger Steinhaus holger at steinhaus-home.de
Thu Feb 28 09:03:36 CET 2013

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


Same observations here. Large linear writes on a single-spinde backing 
device are throtteled to less than 50% of their non-DRBD transfer rate 
when using internal metadata. After moving the metadata to a SSD, almost 
80-90% of the orginal write rate will be reached again (which is a 
performance gain of 2 in fact).

But in contrast to any SSD caching solution, there is no acceleration 
beyond the backing devices original performance. You can only reduce the 
DRBD-induced losses.

Regards,
   Holger


On 27.02.2013 23:13, Arnold Krille wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:32:07 +0100 Lionel Sausin<ls at numerigraphe.com>
> wrote:
>> I wouldn't expect anything like the gains of
>> bcache/flashcache/enhencio. Normally internal metadata are just as
>> fast, thanks to the write cache of your disks and RAID adapter. Those
>> are much faster than SSDs and metadata are small enough.
>> However you may benefit from external metadata when your those caches
>> are saturated by writes (high throughput for a long time).
>> If you do have an SSD and expect big writes, give it a try and please
>> tell us if it really makes a difference.
> My experience with an ssd for (external) meta-data says that imrovement
> is quite a lot!
> You won't get faster continous writes, that is still limited by the
> hdd. But you get much faster random-writes and the reason is this:
>   - With internal meta-data on hdd, each write (or until each barrier)
>     is followed by a disk-seek to the end of the disk where the
>     meta-data lives followed by a seek back to where you are writing.
>     And then you mix random writes at random positions...
>   - With external meta-data on another hdd, your data-disk doesn't have
>     to seek to the end of the disk anymore, step one of improvement.
>   - With external meta-data on ssd, you are only left with the seeks
>     during your normal random writes.
>
> With todays disks and normal usage (unless you are netflix or google),
> the real speed-improvement your users see/feel is not faster throughput
> but lower latency.
>
> Of course, using internal meta-data with the whole partition on ssd
> gives you the best performance, but not everyone can buy enough ssds to
> create a mirrored 6TB array of ssd.
>
> 3x2TB hdd + 160G ssd (for meta-data and the fast-loving databases)
> times two on the other hand is actually affordable...
>
> As to the original authors question: There is a manpage about drbdmeta
> which describes the options to dump and restore the meta-data of an
> offline drbd. So the action will be:
>   - stop the drbd-volume
>   - dump the meta-data
>   - change the config to point the meta-data to the new place
>   - restore the meta-data
>   - restart the drbd-volume
>   - wait for sync (only incremental, not a full sync) and repeat with the
>     other node
>
> I did that with several volumes when our ssds arrived. Test the steps
> with a scrap-drbd-volume before doing the procedure on production-data
> to be sure.
>
> Have fun,
>
> Arnold
>
>
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