Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-23 Thread Al Hopper
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Felix Buenemann
felix.buenem...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Am 19.02.10 20:50, schrieb Bob Friesenhahn:

 On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

 Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around
 300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.

 Well, but the Intel X25-M is the drive that really first cracked the
 problem (earlier high-performance drives were hideously expensive and
 rather brute force). Which was relatively recently. The industry is
 still evolving rapidly.

 What is the problem is it that the X25-M cracked? The X25-M is
 demonstrated to ignore cache sync and toss transactions. As such, it is
 useless for a ZIL.

 Yes, I see no difference with the X25-M with both zfs_nocacheflush=0 and 
 zfs_nocacheflush=1. After setting zfs_nocacheflush=1, the Mtron SSD also 
 performed at around 1000 IOPS, which is still useless, because the array 
 performs the same IOPS without dedicated ZIL.
 Looking at the X25-E (SLC) benchmarks it should be able to do about 3000 
 IOPS, which would improve array performance.

 I think I'll try one of thise inexpensive battery-backed PCI RAM drives from 
 Gigabyte and see how much IOPS they can pull.


I've given up on the Gigabyte card - it's basically unstable.  I've
tested it as a disk drive under ZFS and another operating system.
Again - it glitches out - sometimes after only a couple of minutes if
you tar up /usr (as a relative tar file), gzip it, and then untar it
onto the Gigabyte drive.  I've got two of them - both using the
recommended Kingston RAM.  Both are unstable/flaky.  I've tried
removing some of the RAM to see if that makes a difference - it does
not.  Conclusion: Run Away from this product.

Regards,

--
Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX a...@logical-approach.com
                  Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-22 Thread Miles Nordin
 el == Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org writes:

el Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16
el GByte or more of system memory, and a cheap UPS?

If you think the UPS is good enough that you never have to worry about
your machine rebooting then the extra memory isn't needed to match the
ACARD/hyperdrive performacne---just disable ZIL writing.  AIUI there
is zero point to making a ramdisk slog because you are just copying
from one area of memory into another.

IMHO the overall disabling the ZIL is not dumb, but should be obvious
UPS is totally unequivalent to slog because it doesn't protect against
kernel panics, which are quite common on ZFS NAS if you include cases
where the system didn't actually panic but became unresponsive and had
to be hard-rebooted (ex., for something as simple as ``a drive went
bad by becoming slow''), or cases where you tried to shutdown but the
box got hung somewhere in SMF shutdown land because one of the hundred
little scriptletts decided never to finish.

Also in the real world people trip over cables, NYC mains is more
reliable than UPS power bc of equipment failures and botched battery
upgrades and nonserious sites without bypass switches, blah blah blah.

The interesting middle-ground someone brought up months ago was a
cluster with two RAMdisks, each host iscsi-exporting to the other, and
whichever node is active runs a mirrored slog of the two ramdisks.
The actual slog does not really need to be mirrored so much as `one
ramdisk stored on the inactive member', just 1 copy, just get the data
_off_ the node we're worried about panicing, then if something goes
wrong the inactive member ought to push a copy of the slog out
somewhere else before trying to force-import the pool in case one of
the main pool devices or its contents is poisonous, but then once
imported the newly-active member can discard its local slog ramdisk
and keep just the remote one attached.  IMHO this general idea's got
long-term potential, the idea being: ``treat data stored in RAM on n
nodes as somewhat nonvolatile (given there exists a procedure to
follow if it's lost anyway, such as `restart all the NFS clients' or
`live with a little bit of lost email')''.


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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-20 Thread Robert Milkowski

On 20/02/2010 01:34, Rob Logan wrote:



This would probably work given that your computer never crashes
in an uncontrolled manner. If it does, some data may be lost
(and possibly the entire pool lost, if you are unlucky).
 

the pool would never be at risk, but when your server
reboots, its clients will be confused that things
it sent, and the server promised it had saved, are gone.
For some clients, this small loss might be the loss of their
entire dataset.

   


to be precise he wrote that disable zil or cache flushes... while 
disabling zil won't have any impact on pool consistency disable cache 
flushes might.


--
Robert Milkowski
http://milek.blogspot.com

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[zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Felix Buenemann

Hi,

I'm currently testing a Mtron Pro 7500 16GB SLC SSD as a ZIL device and 
seeing very poor performance for small file writes via NFS.


Copying a source code directory with around 4000 small files to the ZFS 
pool over NFS without the SSD log device yields around 1000 IOPS (pool 
of 8 sata shared mirrors).


When adding the SSD as ZIL, performance drops to 50 IOPS!

I can see similarly poor performance when creating a ZFS pool on the SSD 
and sharing it via NFS. However copy the files locally on the server 
from the sata to the ssd pool only takes a few seconds.


The SSD's specs reveal:
sequential r/w 512B: 83,000/51,000
sequential r/w 4KB: 21,000/13,000
random r/w 512B: 19,000/130
random r/w 4KB: 12,000/130

So it is apparent, that the SSD has really poor random writes.

But I was under the impression, that the ZIL is mostly sequential writes 
or was I misinformed here?


Maybe the cache syncs bring the device to it's knees?

Best Regards,
Felix Buenemann

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, Felix Buenemann wrote:


So it is apparent, that the SSD has really poor random writes.

But I was under the impression, that the ZIL is mostly sequential writes or 
was I misinformed here?


Maybe the cache syncs bring the device to it's knees?


That's what it seems like.  This particular device must actually being 
obeying the cache sync request rather than just pretending to like 
many SSDs.


Most SSDs are very good at seeking, and very good at random reads, but 
most are rather poor at small synchronous writes.  The ones which are 
good at small synchronous writes cost more.


Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Felix Buenemann

Am 19.02.10 19:30, schrieb Bob Friesenhahn:

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, Felix Buenemann wrote:


So it is apparent, that the SSD has really poor random writes.

But I was under the impression, that the ZIL is mostly sequential
writes or was I misinformed here?

Maybe the cache syncs bring the device to it's knees?


That's what it seems like. This particular device must actually being
obeying the cache sync request rather than just pretending to like many
SSDs.

Most SSDs are very good at seeking, and very good at random reads, but
most are rather poor at small synchronous writes. The ones which are
good at small synchronous writes cost more.


Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around 
300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.




Bob


- Felix

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread David Dyer-Bennet

On Fri, February 19, 2010 12:50, Felix Buenemann wrote:


 Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around
 300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.

Well, but the Intel X25-M is the drive that really first cracked the
problem (earlier high-performance drives were hideously expensive and
rather brute force).  Which was relatively recently.  The industry is
still evolving rapidly.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:


Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around
300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.


Well, but the Intel X25-M is the drive that really first cracked the
problem (earlier high-performance drives were hideously expensive and
rather brute force).  Which was relatively recently.  The industry is
still evolving rapidly.


What is the problem is it that the X25-M cracked?  The X25-M is 
demonstrated to ignore cache sync and toss transactions.  As such, it 
is useless for a ZIL.


Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Felix Buenemann

Am 19.02.10 20:50, schrieb Bob Friesenhahn:

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:


Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around
300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.


Well, but the Intel X25-M is the drive that really first cracked the
problem (earlier high-performance drives were hideously expensive and
rather brute force). Which was relatively recently. The industry is
still evolving rapidly.


What is the problem is it that the X25-M cracked? The X25-M is
demonstrated to ignore cache sync and toss transactions. As such, it is
useless for a ZIL.


Yes, I see no difference with the X25-M with both zfs_nocacheflush=0 and 
zfs_nocacheflush=1. After setting zfs_nocacheflush=1, the Mtron SSD also 
performed at around 1000 IOPS, which is still useless, because the array 
performs the same IOPS without dedicated ZIL.
Looking at the X25-E (SLC) benchmarks it should be able to do about 3000 
IOPS, which would improve array performance.


I think I'll try one of thise inexpensive battery-backed PCI RAM drives 
from Gigabyte and see how much IOPS they can pull.




Bob


- Felix


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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread David Dyer-Bennet

On Fri, February 19, 2010 13:50, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
 On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

 Too bad, I'm getting ~1000 IOPS with an Intel X25-M G2 MLC and around
 300 with a regular USB stick, so 50 IOPS is really poor for an SLC SSD.

 Well, but the Intel X25-M is the drive that really first cracked the
 problem (earlier high-performance drives were hideously expensive and
 rather brute force).  Which was relatively recently.  The industry is
 still evolving rapidly.

 What is the problem is it that the X25-M cracked?  The X25-M is
 demonstrated to ignore cache sync and toss transactions.  As such, it
 is useless for a ZIL.

But it's finally useful as, for example, a notebook boot drive.  No
previous vaguely affordable design was.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Marion Hakanson
felix.buenem...@googlemail.com said:
 I think I'll try one of thise inexpensive battery-backed PCI RAM drives  from
 Gigabyte and see how much IOPS they can pull. 

Another poster, Tracy Bernath, got decent ZIL IOPS from an OCZ Vertex unit.
Dunno if that's sufficient for your purposes, but it looked pretty good
for the money.

Marion


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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Felix Buenemann

Am 19.02.10 21:29, schrieb Marion Hakanson:

felix.buenem...@googlemail.com said:

I think I'll try one of thise inexpensive battery-backed PCI RAM drives  from
Gigabyte and see how much IOPS they can pull.


Another poster, Tracy Bernath, got decent ZIL IOPS from an OCZ Vertex unit.
Dunno if that's sufficient for your purposes, but it looked pretty good
for the money.


I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata 
ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power 
failure.
Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty 
reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC should 
be more than sufficient.


http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm



Marion


- Felix


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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Eugen Leitl
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0100, Felix Buenemann wrote:

 I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata 
 ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power 
 failure.
 Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty 
 reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC should 
 be more than sufficient.

Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16 GByte or more of
system memory, and a cheap UPS?
 
 http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm

-- 
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org
__
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Ragnar Sundblad

On 19 feb 2010, at 23.40, Eugen Leitl wrote:

 On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0100, Felix Buenemann wrote:
 
 I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata 
 ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power 
 failure.
 Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty 
 reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC should 
 be more than sufficient.
 
 Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16 GByte or more of
 system memory, and a cheap UPS?

System memory can't replace a slog, since a slog is supposed to be
non-volatile.

An UPS plus disabling zil, or disabling synchronization, could possibly
achieve the same result (or maybe better) iops wise.
This would probably work given that your computer never crashes
in an uncontrolled manner. If it does, some data may be lost
(and possibly the entire pool lost, if you are unlucky).

/ragge

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Daniel Carosone
On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:51:29PM +0100, Ragnar Sundblad wrote:
 
 On 19 feb 2010, at 23.40, Eugen Leitl wrote:
  On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0100, Felix Buenemann wrote:
  I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata 
  ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power 
  failure.
  Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty 
  reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC should 
  be more than sufficient.

These are the same as the acard devices we've discussed here
previously; earlier hyperdrive models were their own design.  Very
interesting, and my personal favourite, but I don't know of anyone
actually reporting results yet with them as ZIL.

If you have more memory in them than is needed for ZIL, with some
partitioning you could make a small fast pool on them for swap space
and other purposes.  I was originally looking at these for Postgres
WAL logfiles, before there was slog and on a different platform..

Also, if you have enough non-ECC memory there's a mode where it adds
its own redundancy for reduced space, which could allow reusing
existing kit - replace non-ecc system memory with ecc. 

  Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16 GByte or more of
  system memory, and a cheap UPS?
 
 System memory can't replace a slog, since a slog is supposed to be
 non-volatile.

System memory might already be maxed out, too.  

--
Dan.



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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Toby Thain


On 19-Feb-10, at 5:40 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0100, Felix Buenemann wrote:


I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata
ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power
failure.
Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty
reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC  
should

be more than sufficient.


Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16 GByte or  
more of

system memory, and a cheap UPS?



That would depend on the read/write mix, I think?

--Toby





http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm


--
Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org
__
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Rob Logan

 An UPS plus disabling zil, or disabling synchronization, could possibly
 achieve the same result (or maybe better) iops wise.
Even with the fastest slog, disabling zil will always be faster... 
(less bytes to move)

 This would probably work given that your computer never crashes
 in an uncontrolled manner. If it does, some data may be lost
 (and possibly the entire pool lost, if you are unlucky).
the pool would never be at risk, but when your server
reboots, its clients will be confused that things
it sent, and the server promised it had saved, are gone.
For some clients, this small loss might be the loss of their 
entire dataset.

Rob

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Thomas Garner
 These are the same as the acard devices we've discussed here
 previously; earlier hyperdrive models were their own design.  Very
 interesting, and my personal favourite, but I don't know of anyone
 actually reporting results yet with them as ZIL.

Here's one report:

http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg27739.html
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Ragnar Sundblad

On 20 feb 2010, at 02.34, Rob Logan wrote:

 
 An UPS plus disabling zil, or disabling synchronization, could possibly
 achieve the same result (or maybe better) iops wise.
 Even with the fastest slog, disabling zil will always be faster... 
 (less bytes to move)
 
 This would probably work given that your computer never crashes
 in an uncontrolled manner. If it does, some data may be lost
 (and possibly the entire pool lost, if you are unlucky).
 the pool would never be at risk, but when your server
 reboots, its clients will be confused that things
 it sent, and the server promised it had saved, are gone.
 For some clients, this small loss might be the loss of their 
 entire dataset.

No, the entire pool shouldn't be at risk, you are right of course,
I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry!

/ragge

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Re: [zfs-discuss] Poor ZIL SLC SSD performance

2010-02-19 Thread Felix Buenemann

Am 20.02.10 01:33, schrieb Toby Thain:


On 19-Feb-10, at 5:40 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote:


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:17:29PM +0100, Felix Buenemann wrote:


I found the Hyperdrive 5/5M, which is a half-height drive bay sata
ramdisk with battery backup and auto-backup to compact flash at power
failure.
Promises 65,000 IOPS and thus should be great for ZIL. It's pretty
reasonable priced (~230 EUR) and stacked with 4GB or 8GB DDR2-ECC should
be more than sufficient.


Wouldn't it be better investing these 300-350 EUR into 16 GByte or
more of
system memory, and a cheap UPS?



That would depend on the read/write mix, I think?


Well the workload will include MaxDB (SAP), Exchange and file services 
(SMB), with the opensolaris box acting as a VMFS iSCSI target for VMware 
vSphere. Due to the mixed workload it's hard to predict how exactly the 
I/O distribution will look like, so I'm trying to build a system that 
can hold up in various usage scenarios.


I've been testing with NFS because it loads the ZIL heavily.

Btw. in my testing I didn't really see a performance improvement with 
ZIL disabled over on disk ZIL, but I've only been testing with a single 
NFS client. Or do I need multiple concurrent clients to benefit from 
external ZIL?


Also is there a guideline on sizing the ZIL? I think in most cases even 
1GB would be enough, but I haven't done any heavy testing.




--Toby


- Felix

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