On Jul 09, 2007  07:08 -0700, Zhe Zhang wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. What about read-ahead then? Is it the same
> as caching, and is performed on the client side only?

The readahead is only on the client side, since most uses of Lustre have
such a high load on the server that doing readahead on the server is a
net loss of performance.

The amount of client readahead is tuned on the client via
/proc/fs/lustre/llite/*/max_read_ahead_mb.  There is a second tunable
/proc/fs/lustre/llite/*/max_read_ahead_whole_mb, which is the size of
a file (in MB, or fraction thereof) below which the whole file will
be read into the client cache regardless of the IO pattern.

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Andreas Dilger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Zhe Zhang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 3, 2007 5:54:49 PM
> Subject: Re: [Lustre-devel] Lustre Server Caching
> 
> On Jul 03, 2007  06:41 -0700, Zhe Zhang wrote:
> > I have a question about the caching policy Lustre uses on 
> > the server side. I'm using 1.4.7 and my current setting
> > is 1 MDS, 3 OST and 2 clients. My experience is that if
> > client 1 first fetches a file "foo" from Lustre to its 
> > own /tmp directory and client 2 tries to fetch "foo" later,
> > client 2 will get the file faster. I wonder if Lustre is
> > using caching on the server side. I mean, data server, not
> > MDS. I searched this mail list and did not get clear clue.
> > Can anybody tell me if a Lustre server will save accessed 
> > data in its memory or not? It is quite important in the 
> > performance analysis of our research. 
> 
> Lustre does NO data caching on the server.  However, it DOES do caching
> of the file metadata, so this might speed the second access to the file.
> 
> Cheers, Andreas
> --
> Andreas Dilger
> Principal Software Engineer
> Cluster File Systems, Inc.


Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.

_______________________________________________
Lustre-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.clusterfs.com/mailman/listinfo/lustre-devel

Reply via email to