[Lustre-discuss] small file performance

[Robin Humble]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 09:44:54AM -0500, Aaron Knister wrote:
>For whatever reason, searching my lustre mount (ls -R or find),  
>compiling code and other operations involving lots of small files are  
>painfully slow. There is no load on the filesystem other than my  
>various tests. I've disabled lnet debugging. Just to give you an idea  
>of how slow it is-- a ./configure of this particular code on a local  
>filesystem takes less than a minute. On lustre it's been running for  
>five minutes and is hardly half way through. An untar on the local  
>filesystem takes .9 seconds while that same untar takes 12 seconds to  
>our lustre mount. Any ideas for improving this?

do you have striping turned off?
that makes a massive difference for metadata operations...
  lfs setstripe -d /some/lustre/dir/

cheers,
robin