[Lustre-discuss] One or two OSS, no difference?

Andreas Dilger adilger at sun.com
Fri Mar 5 14:05:45 PST 2010


On 2010-03-05, at 14:53, Jeffrey Bennett wrote:
> Andreas, if we are using 4kb blocks I understand we only transfer 1  
> page per RPC call, so are we limited to 10-15K RPC per second or  
> what's the same, 10-15.000 IOPS?

That depends on whether you are doing read or write requests, whether  
it is in the client cache, etc.  Random read requests would definitely  
fall under the RPC limit, random write requests can benefit from  
aggregation on the client, assuming you aren't doing O_DIRECT or  
O_SYNC IO operations.

Increasing your max_rpcs_in_flight and max_dirty_mb on the clients can  
improve IOPS, assuming the servers are not handling enough requests  
from the clients.  Check the RPC req_waittime, req_qdepth,  
ost_{read,write} service time via:

     lctl get_param ost.OSS.ost_io.stats

to see whether the servers are saturated, or idle.  CPU usage may also  
be a factor.

There was also bug 22074 fixed recently (post 1.8.2) that addresses a  
performance problem with lots of small IOs to different files (NOT  
related to small IOs to a single file).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas.Dilger at sun.com [mailto:Andreas.Dilger at sun.com] On  
> Behalf Of Andreas Dilger
> Sent: Friday, March 05, 2010 2:05 AM
> To: Jeffrey Bennett
> Cc: Oleg.Drokin at Sun.COM; lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> Subject: Re: [Lustre-discuss] One or two OSS, no difference?
>
> On 2010-03-04, at 14:18, Jeffrey Bennett wrote:
>> I just noticed the sequential performance is ok, but the random IO
>> (which is what I am measuring) is not. Is there any way to increase
>> random IO performance on Lustre? We have LUNs that can provide
>> around 250.000 random read 4kb IOPS but we are only seeing 3.000 to
>> 10.000 on Lustre.
>
> There is work currently underway to improve the SMP scaling
> performance for the RPC handling layer in Lustre.  Currently that
> limits the delivered RPC rate to 10-15k/sec or so.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Oleg.Drokin at Sun.COM [mailto:Oleg.Drokin at Sun.COM]
>> Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 12:49 PM
>> To: Jeffrey Bennett
>> Cc: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
>> Subject: Re: [Lustre-discuss] One or two OSS, no difference?
>>
>> Hello!
>>
>>  This is pretty strange. Are there any differences in network
>> topology that can explain this?
>>  If you remove the first client, does the second one shows
>> performance
>>  at the level of of the first, but as soon as you start the load on
>> the first again, the second
>>  client performance drops?
>>
>> Bye,
>>   Oleg
>> On Mar 4, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Jeffrey Bennett wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Oleg, thanks for your reply
>>>
>>> I was actually testing with only one client. When adding a second
>>> client using a different file, one client gets all the performance
>>> and the other one gets very low performance, any recommendation?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance
>>>
>>> jab
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Oleg.Drokin at Sun.COM [mailto:Oleg.Drokin at Sun.COM]
>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 5:20 PM
>>> To: Jeffrey Bennett
>>> Cc: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
>>> Subject: Re: [Lustre-discuss] One or two OSS, no difference?
>>>
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> On Mar 3, 2010, at 6:35 PM, Jeffrey Bennett wrote:
>>>> We are building a very small Lustre cluster with 32 clients
>>>> (patchless) and two OSS servers. Each OSS server has 1 OST with 1
>>>> TB of Solid State Drives. All is connected using dual-port DDR IB.
>>>>
>>>> For testing purposes, I am enabling/disabling one of the OSS/OST
>>>> by using the "lfs setstripe" command. I am running XDD and vdbench
>>>> benchmarks.
>>>>
>>>> Does anybody have an idea why there is no difference in MB/sec or
>>>> random IOPS when using one OSS or two OSS? A quick test with "dd"
>>>> also shows the same MB/sec when using one or two OSTs.
>>>
>>> I wonder if you just don't saturate even one OST (both backend SSD
>>> and IB interconnect) with this number of clients? Does the total
>>> throughput decreases as you decrease
>>> number of active clients and increases as you increase it even
>>> further?
>>> Increasing maximum number of in-flight rpcs might help in that case.
>>> Also are all of your clients writing to the same file or each
>>> client does io to a separate file (I hope)?
>>>
>>> Bye,
>>>  Oleg
>>
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>
>
> Cheers, Andreas
> --
> Andreas Dilger
> Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
> Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.
>


Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.




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