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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3248?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13137148#comment-13137148
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Zhu Han commented on CASSANDRA-3248:
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Is the write cache on the SATA drives turned off? If no, durability of the file
system is not assured.
5K flush operations on SATA disk without NVRAM is amazing for me.
> CommitLog writer should call fdatasync instead of fsync
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-3248
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3248
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Core
> Affects Versions: 0.6.13, 0.7.9, 0.8.6, 1.0.0, 1.1
> Environment: Linux
> Reporter: Zhu Han
> Assignee: Brandon Williams
> Original Estimate: 48h
> Remaining Estimate: 48h
>
> CommitLogSegment uses SequentialWriter to flush the buffered data to log
> device. It depends on FileDescriptor#sync() which invokes fsync() as it force
> the file attributes to disk.
> However, at least on Linux, fdatasync() is good enough for commit log flush:
> bq. fdatasync() is similar to fsync(), but does not flush modified metadata
> unless that metadata is needed in order to allow a subsequent data retrieval
> to be correctly handled. For example, changes to st_atime or st_mtime
> (respectively, time of last access and time of last modification; see
> stat(2)) do not require flushing because they are not necessary for a
> subsequent data read to be handled correctly. On the other hand, a change to
> the file size (st_size, as made by say ftruncate(2)), would require a
> metadata flush.
> File size is synced to disk by fdatasync() either. Although the commit log
> recovery logic sorts the commit log segements on their modify timestamp, it
> can be removed safely, IMHO.
> I checked the native code of JRE 6. On Linux and Solaris,
> FileChannel#force(false) invokes fdatasync(). On windows, the false flag does
> not have any impact.
> On my log device (commodity SATA HDD, write cache disabled), there is large
> performance gap between fsync() and fdatasync():
> {quote}
> $sysbench --test=fileio --num-threads=1 --file-num=1 --file-total-size=10G
> --file-fsync-all=on --file-fsync-mode={color:red}fdatasync{color}
> --file-test-mode=seqwr --max-time=600 --file-block-size=2K --max-requests=0
> run
> {color:blue}54.90{color} Requests/sec executed
> per-request statistics:
> min: 8.29ms
> avg: 18.18ms
> max: 108.36ms
> approx. 95 percentile: 25.02ms
> $ sysbench --test=fileio --num-threads=1 --file-num=1 --file-total-size=10G
> --file-fsync-all=on --file-fsync-mode={color:red}fsync{color}
> --file-test-mode=seqwr --max-time=600 --file-block-size=2K --max-requests=0
> run
> {color:blue}28.08{color} Requests/sec executed
> per-request statistics:
> min: 33.28ms
> avg: 35.61ms
> max: 911.87ms
> approx. 95 percentile: 41.69ms
> {quote}
> I do think this is a very critical performance improvement.
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