Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
On 7/11/11 4:21 PM, Phil Stoneman wrote: > On 11/07/11 15:13, Mark Dokter wrote: >> On 07/10/2011 07:30 PM, Phil Stoneman wrote: >>> I've seen a similar thing with small writes, and for me, using >>> no-disk-barrier and no-disk-flushes solved the small write performance >>> issue. Hope that helps! :-) >> >> From [1]: >> "Unfortunately device mapper (LVM) might not support barriers." >> >> Although, cat /proc/drbd states >> 3: cs:Connected ro:Secondary/Primary ds:UpToDate/UpToDate C r---- >> ns:0 nr:46983440 dw:46983440 dr:0 al:0 bm:2863 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0 ap:0 >> ep:1 wo:b oos:0 > > I think that LVM that comes with recent kernels support barriers, which > is why you're seeing this. > How recent? I'm using the 2.6.32.41 xen-stable git tree from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jeremy/xen.git > >> Furthermore, my 3ware RAID controllers do not have a BBU installed and I >> read that it's not recommended to use no-disk-barriers and >> no-disk-flushes in this case. The servers are connected to a quite large >> ups tough. Does that suffice? > > From what I understand, the main risk of not using barriers is that when > drbd thinks something's written to disk, it might not actually be. And > that's possibly not great - but to me, it doesn't seem any worse than > using a SATA disk normally with the internal disk write ccache. > Anyway, if you have a UPS which is configured to gracefully shut your > machines down on power loss, it should have approximately the same > effect as having a BBU. > Unfortunately, the UPS is powering the whole facility and there's no communication mechanism to shut down gracefully. Furthermore, my two xen servers (at least I observed that behaviour on one of them) tend to reboot *sometimes* when there's a total loss of communication with the other server. I've already read some forum posts/mails of people who have the same problem. There seems to be some weird bug with xen and drbd. I didn't have time to investigate that issue yet. > > Or, to put it another way: I have good and regularly tested backups; the > small risk of losing a bit of data on writes is more than offset by the > massive speed benefit that no-disk-barrier and no-disk-flushes gives me. > We've got a regular backup on tape, but that doesn't cover system partitions of the virtual machines. So the issue is the downtime, not the loss of data, if a partition gets corrupted :( > > You can see my previous discussion on this here: > > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.linux.drbd/21997 > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.linux.drbd/22056 > > Phil Mark