[lustre-discuss] Lustre OSS and clients on same physical server

Jon Tegner tegner at foi.se
Wed Aug 10 23:47:50 PDT 2016


Regarding clients and OSS on same physical server. Seems to me the 
problem is not (directly) related to the amount of memory on the 
machine, but instead to different applications "competing" for the memory?

Could this possibly be resolved by running lustre in a virtual machine? 
Or would there be some other way to "partition" the memory in separate 
"batches" (or containers)? One for the application and one for the servers?

In most cases it seems wise to keep the servers separate from the 
clients, but e.g., in a "desk side", personal, smaller cluster (with 
basically only one user) it would be nice (better use of the resources) 
IF it would be possible to put servers and clients on the same machines.

/jon

On 07/15/2016 10:17 PM, Christopher J. Morrone wrote:
> On 07/15/2016 12:11 PM, Cory Spitz wrote:
>> Chris,
>>
>> On 7/13/16, 2:00 PM, "lustre-discuss on behalf of Christopher J. Morrone" <lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org on behalf of morrone2 at llnl.gov> wrote:
>>
>>> If you put both the client and server code on the same node and do any
>>> serious amount of IO, it has been pretty easy in the past to get that
>>> node to go completely out to lunch thrashing on memory issues
>> Chris, you wrote “in the past.”  How current is your experience?  I’m sure it is still a good word of caution, but I’d venture that modern Lustre (on a modern kernel) might fare a tad bit better.  Does anyone have experience on current releases?
> Pretty recent.
>
> We have had memory management issues with servers and clients
> independently at pretty much all periods of time, recent history
> included.  Putting the components together only exacerbates the issues.
>
> Lustre still has too many of its own caches with fixed, or nearly fixed
> caches size, and places where it does not play well with the kernel
> memory reclaim mechanisms.  There are too many places where lustre
> ignores the kernels requests for memory reclaim, and often goes on to
> use even more memory.  That significantly impedes the kernel's ability
> to keep things responsive when memory contention arises.
>
>> I understand that it isn’t a design goal for us, but perhaps we should pay some attention to this possibility?  Perhaps we’ll have interest in co-locating clients on servers in the near future as part of a replication, network striping, or archiving capability?
> There is going to need to be a lot of work to have Lustre's memory usage
> be more dynamic, more aware of changing conditions on the system, and
> more responsive to the kernel's requests to free memory.  I imagine it
> won't be terribly easy, especially in areas such as dirty and unstable
> data which cannot be freed until it is safe on disk.  But even for that,
> there are no doubt ways to make things better.
>
> Chris
>
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