[DRBD-user] drbd-0.7.0 with linux-2.4. slow?

Bernd Schubert bernd-schubert at web.de
Thu Jul 29 00:06:35 CEST 2004

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


Hello Lars ;) and all others,

I already shortly hinted in my previous mail that we have nfs problems. Well, 
I first thought that it is nfs related and started a thread on the nfs 
mailing list (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=9064778). 

Finally Olaf Kirch suggested to run iozone  directly on the server to see if 
it might be filesystem related. It was then pretty fast clear that its the 
drbd device that is slow.

Here some numbers (iozone -s 1g -r 1m  -o -i 0):

both servers synchronized: 11MB/s
drbd stopped on the second server: 60MB/s

Well, with sync-nfs exports this probably causes the slow nfs-writes of only 
2-3MB/s on the clients for large files and even much less with small files.

Well, we first tried to use 2.6.7 but it crashed every morning with page 
allocation errors (and no one on LKML seems to care :-(  ). 
However, with 2.6.7 we didn't have performance problems with nfs. Before our 
server went into production I did several speed tests and four clients could 
write to the drbd exported device with 4 x 7.5MB/s, which I considered to be 
sufficient and so did not further tests to the drbd device(s).

Due to the instability of 2.6.7 we had to switch back to 2.4.27-rc3 on Sunday, 
but kept drbd-0.7. On Monday the people complained that e.g. compiling their 
projects took ages, so I changed to nfs async exports and the people stopped 
complaining ;)
However, since we want to have failover, we also need sync-mounts, so I 
started the thread on the NFS-ML.

Olaf also suggested to tune the bdflushing, as I had no experience with that I 
used the numbers from another howto 
(http://robert.timetraveller.org/talks/optimisation/sect4.1.1.html), but it 
didn't help.

Well, so I'm asking here if someone here has an idea?
Somehow I would like to try using protocol A or B instead of the current 
protocol C. Its worth a try, isn't it?
Is it sufficient to change the protocol in the configuration files and then 
restart drbd?
Lars, referring to your mail to LINUX-HA we should use drbd-0.7.1 for any 
other protocol than C? Thats not problem, but I don't want to reboot the 
server with a new kernel until the weekend. 

Thanks in advance,
	Bernd




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