Hello,

I've a Red Hat 5.7 2-node cluster for electronic mail services where the 
mailboxes (maildir format)
are stored on GFS2 volume. The volume contains about 7500000 files for ~740 GB 
of disk space
occupation. Previously the mailboxes were on a GFS1 volume, and I migrated to 
GFS2 when we changed
the SAN storage system.

Due to incremental backups that have become extremely slow (about 41-42H) after 
the migration from
GFS to GFS2, I checked the configuration/tuning of the cluster and volume mount 
options, with the
help of Red Hat support, but the optimizations (<gfs_controld 
plock_rate_limit="0"/>, mount with
noatime and nodiratime) don't have significantly accelerated the incremental 
backups.

So I tried another backup strategy, using the snaphot feature of our SAN 
storage system, doing
backups outside the cluster environment. I use the snapshots of the GSF2 on 
another server (also
with RHEL 5.7) mounting the volume as a local (not clustered) filesystem:

/var/mailboxes type gfs2 
(rw,noatime,nodiratime,lockproto=lock_nolock,localflocks,localcaching)

The duration of full backups are slightly better (from 24-25H to 21-22H of 
duration) and the
incremental backup are "acceptable" (about 9H). But the speed is still low in 
comparison to backups
of Ext3 filesystems, particularly for incremental backups.

I've notice that the glocks are still used, also when I mount a snapshot of the 
mailbox GFS2
partition as a local filesystem:


# mount -t gfs2 /dev/mapper/posta_mbox_disk_vg-posta_mbox_disk_lvol1 
/var/mailboxes -o
lockproto=lock_nolock,noatime,nodiratime
# time cp -Rp /var/mailboxes/prova* /var/tmp/test/

real    2m5.648s
user    0m0.311s
sys     0m13.243s
# rm -Rf /var/tmp/test/*
# time cp -Rp /var/mailboxes/prova* /var/tmp/test/

real    0m10.946s
user    0m0.254s
sys     0m10.634s

# cat /proc/slabinfo | grep gloc
gfs2_glock         35056  35064    424    9    1 : tunables   54   27    8 : 
slabdata   3896   3896
     0

Is there a way to exclude the use of the glocks, or them are necessary to 
access the partition, even
if mounted as local filesystem?

Thanks

Davide Brunato

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Davide Brunato
Sistema Informatico SISSA: http://sis.sissa.it
via Bonomea 265 - 34136 Trieste - Italy
tel: +39-040-3787538  e-mail: brun...@sissa.it

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