Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
On Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:49:16 +0100 Lionel Sausin <ls at numerigraphe.com> wrote: > It's interesting because, normally, writes do not directly translate > to head seeks (thanks to dirty pages, caches, NCQ, firmware-level > optimization...), and ideally barriers should be disabled (and caches > reliable). If you want secure storage on disk, every write translates to disk-head-action, if you have random writes, every write results in a head-seek. Otherwise the data wouldn't be on disk. Actually every write has to result in two seeks: seek the position to write, seek the position to write the fs' metadata. With drbd and internal-metadata you add another seek to the end of the disk... > Florian Haas once suggested[1] that "if using external metadata > actually improves your performance versus internal metadata, you have > underlying performance problems to fix." > Have you been investigating this possibility? > Or is the improvement specific to the type of write load your server > endures? There isn't much you can optimize. Where are not upscaling the solution to support big clouds and data-centers, we are down-scaling the solutions to give small businesses the advantages of HA and redundancy. We don't do big-data and web-apps on these setups but file-, terminal- and internal-mailservers. We hate raid-controllers and hw-raid for too much bad has happened to us and our customers with missing spares, data-loss after firmware-upgrades and similar problems. Give us a bunch of disk so we can run sw-raid, lvm and drbd on them! If the motherboard has ahci-hotplug, I can switch the whole lot of disks without the server rebooting once, pvmove for the data-partitions and usage of mdadm for the root-partition is enough. And with one disk for data, one ssd for metadata, drbd for network-raid1, a dedicated 1G-link for drbd and two of these setup, we get dbench to tell us that throughput is maxing out the link (with protocol C, most times I use protocol A) and latency is as low as a local disc. And dbench is my benchmark of choice for that because it plays back office usage patterns, not some artificial big reads/writes. Exactly what we and our customers do all day. Thus the results of dbench have proven to be a very good indicator of whether users will complain or not. Have fun, Arnold -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.linbit.com/pipermail/drbd-user/attachments/20130228/cf9a7eb1/attachment.pgp>