Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
> About the performance issues you mentioned. The performance tests I've
> conducted were run using mysqlslap, and backed up using some lower-level
> latency tests, but test results were similar initially. Going back to the
> test results you've reported:
>
> > Old Servers (2 single-core CPUs):
> > Database on Local Storage
> > insert test: 212.00 sec.
> > Database on DRBD Device
> > insert test: 998.00 sec.
> > ----------------------------
> > DRBD Overhead: 786 sec. = 370%
>
> Eliminate competition for CPU resources between DRBD an MySQL, by pinning
> DRBD's kernel threads to one CPU core and mysqld on the other, like so
> (assuming drbd0 is your device you're running your MySQL databases on):
>
> for thread in worker asender receiver; do
> taskset -p 0x01 $(pidof drbd0_$thread)
> done
> taskset -p 0x02 $(pidof mysqld)
>
> If you're unfamiliar with taskset, be sure to read its man page to understand
> what those CPU affinity masks mean.
>
> Do that, then re-run your tests (on your old server) and share your results.
>
> That tweak alone reduced my DRBD overhead for mysqlslap from 224% to 57% on
> the test system I have at my disposal.
>
> > New Servers (2 quad-core CPUs):
> > Database on Local Storage
> > insert test: 164.00 sec. (22% better than old servers)
> > Database on DRBD Device
> > insert test: 1137.00 sec. (14% *worse* than old servers)
> > ----------------------------
> > DRBD Overhead: 973 sec. = 590%
>
> Yup, now given the CPU resource competition issues described earlier, these
> are probably being exacerbated by the fact that there are now 8 logical
> CPUs (cores) available, versus 2 on your old server. You can do one of two
> things here:
>
> 1. Pin the DRBD threads to one core, and allocate the others to MySQL.
> 2. Pin the DRBD threads to one core, and allocate only a few of the others to
> MySQL. I've heard some SMP issues are present in InnoDB; more cores doesn't
> necessarily mean better performance.
>
> There are other settings that can be tweaked (I can come down to about 26%
> overhead on my system, which is about as low as the network will let me), but
> I'd be interested to learn whether you can confirm my results with regard to
> CPU affinity tweaking.
OK, so I have re-run the benchmarks after pinning the DRBD threads to
one core in the first CPU and the mysqld process to 4 cores in the
second CPU like so:
taskset -p 0x80 (pids of drbd threads)
taskset -p 0x0f (pid of mysqld)
The benchmark result improved, but not as dramatically as I had hoped:
Database on DRBD Device
insert test: 938.00 sec.
Should I have expected a more dramatic improvement? What else can I do
to get to the bottom of the poor performance of DRBD in my setup?
Thoughts?
Sam