[lustre-discuss] lustre for home directories

[Dilger, Andreas]

On Apr 25, 2018, at 11:09, Riccardo Veraldi <Riccardo.Veraldi at cnaf.infn.it> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> just wondering if who is using lustre for home directories with several
> users is happy or not.

I can't comment for other people, but there are definitely some sites that are using Lustre for the /home directories.  Hopefully they will speak up here.

> I am considering to move home directories from NFS to Lustre/ZFS.
> it is quite easy to send the NFS server in troubles with just a few
> users copying files around.
> What special tuning is needed to optimize Lustre usage with small files?
> I guess 1M record size wold not be a good choice anymore.

You should almost certainly use a default of stripe_count=1 for home directories, on the assumption that files should not be gigantic.

In that case, stripe size does not matter if you have 1-stripe files.  This does not affect the on-disk allocation size.  If you have dedicated OSTs for the /home directories, then I'd recommend NOT to use recordsize=1M for ZFS, and instead leave it at the default (recordsize=128k).

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Principal Architect
Intel Corporation