-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:31:28 +0200
Gaudenz Steinlin <gaud...@debian.org> wrote:

> 
> Hi Andreas
> 
> 
> Andreas Glaeser <bugs.andreas.glae...@freenet.de> writes:
> 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > To check if btrfs is really slow I tried the following:
> > - -# aptitude install btrfs-tools
> > - -created a btrfs-partition as /dev/sdb14 with gparted and aligned it to 
> > sector, not
> > to mbr, because the harddisk is an advanced format model with 4096k blocks.
> > - -# mkfs -t btrfs /dev/sdb14
> > - -# mkdir /mnt/test
> > - -# mount /dev/sdb14 /mnt/test
> > - -# exit
> > andreas@g4d:~$ cd /mnt/test
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ mkdir fs-root-c-arc
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ time cp -a /* fs-root-c-arc/ >c-arc.txt 2>c-err.txt
> >
> > real        7m48.020s
> > user        0m5.304s
> > sys 1m22.868s
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ ls -l
> > total 2775172
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas          0 Aug  7 08:20 c-arc.txt
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas    1145749 Aug  7 08:27 c-err.txt
> > drwxr-xr-x 1 andreas andreas        136 Aug  7 08:27 fs-root-c-arc
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ du -hs fs-root-c-arc/
> > 3.6G        fs-root-c-arc/
> >
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ chmod 000 fs-root-c-arc/
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ time tar -cvf t-arc.tar /* >t-out.txt 2>t-err.txt
> >
> > real        6m25.904s
> > user        0m6.016s
> > sys 0m47.936s
> > andreas@g4d:/mnt/test$ ls -l
> > total 2784108
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas          0 Aug  7 08:20 c-arc.txt
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas    1145749 Aug  7 08:27 c-err.txt
> > drwxr--r-- 1 andreas andreas        136 Aug  7 08:27 fs-root-c-arc
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas 2841907200 Aug  7 08:47 t-arc.tar
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas    1348292 Aug  7 08:47 t-err.txt
> > - -rw-r--r-- 1 andreas andreas    6513194 Aug  7 08:47 t-out.txt
> >
> > This were two tests, first created an archive of the root filesystem using 
> > cp below
> > the folder /mnt/test/fs-root-c-arc/. This issued a lot of errors and 
> > warning because
> > of missing permissions or files, which changed while being read, but in the 
> > end after
> > 7m48s there were 151869 items in that folder, totalling 3.6 GB.
> > Next the mode of the folder was set to 000, because else the content of the 
> > folder
> > would be taken into the newly created .tar-archive recursively. 
> > Then doing basically the same thing, but putting all readable and 
> > accessable files
> > into a single uncompressed .tar-archive instead of just copying them.
> > this was even faster with 6m25s and the archive was 2.6 Gb in size.
> > This is not the same as installing from DVD and via network over http, but 
> > big files
> > and many small files are both written fast enough from xfs to btrfs, given 
> > that this
> > is a green-labeled harddisk, which is not supposed to break any 
> > velocity-records. So I
> > downgraded the installation-report to 'wishlist'. I consider the problems 
> > were due to
> > some kind of strange IRQ-conflict or the like. A software-upgrade was not 
> > done since
> > installation, just some additional packages installed.
> 
> No, your test did not really simulate the situation during installation.
> The problem with btrfs is not poor write performance in general, but
> very poor fsync performance. dpkg does a lot of fsync's and is therefore
> heavily affected by this.
> 
> You could verify this by running debootstrap on a btrfs filesstem
> (debootstrap wheezy /mnt). This will be incredibly slow. On the other
> hand if you use the "eatmydata" utility which turns all fsync calls into
> noops, it will be fast: "eatmydata debootstrap wheezy /mnt". But beware,
> it's called eatmydata for a reason...
> 
> Gaudenz
> 
Now I retried installing the debian base-system onto my previously created 
test-partition,
selected the smp-kernel, which has no effect until next reboot, so everythin is 
done on
a single core only, and chose the default generic initrd.img. This took about 
19m 05s.
I retried this with a newly created partition, created during the 
installation-process
using the d-i-partitioning-tool, the result was almost identical, taking 19m 
25s, the
difference probably being due to my slow resposiveness on interactive questions.
When I looked at the two partitions with gparted, there was no information 
about their
alignment, the tool only allows to select this while creating partitions, but 
can not
display information seemingly about existing partitions. cfdisk was not able to 
show any
partitions on the harddrive, but claimed, the disk was empty. It is a bit 
strange, might
actually be another bug.
So overall it was right to set the bug-severity to wishlist, because the weak 
performance
was obviously due to faulty hardware and maybe due to some fault-correction or 
-avoidance
mechanism in btrfs. the file system probably tries to preserve data integrity 
when
disk-problems occur. Reading data did go at near to normal speed actually.
It is safe now to close this report in my opinion.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAlArSxgACgkQ5+rBHyUt5wuLIgCeIPWoQniio6Z1hqTKi70qo1mr
Q40AoLKYRwG2a0rZDqrq3FC1VE24WD/L
=4gC9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Reply via email to