[Gluster-users] Single-thread read/write performance over TCP/IP?

Marcus Bointon marcus at synchromedia.co.uk
Wed Mar 9 08:00:35 UTC 2011


On 7 Mar 2011, at 23:04, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:

> I need to be able to read 500 megabytes/second, sustained, from a
> single file using a single thread.  I have achieved such speeds and
> higher, reading 200+ gigabytes sequentially, using a fast RAID and XFS
> (i.e., local storage).  I would like to replace that design with
> something more networked and scalable.  But my individual clients
> still require 500+ megabyte/second reads.
> 
> If I tie together a half dozen fast GlusterFS servers with 10GigE,
> will I be able to serve another half dozen 10GigE clients at 500MB/sec
> each?  (Again, assuming single-file, single-thread on each client.
> Also assume each server can read/write its local store at ~1000 MB/sec
> sustained.)

10GigE will give you net throughput of around 1Gbyte/sec, so two clients going at 500M/sec on the same partition/interface (and assuming your switch will run at wire speed) will saturate it. Maybe you should have a separate 10G interface on each server for each client? You might run into trouble with bus bandwidth on the servers though.

From what I understand of gluster, you might get this kind of bandwidth if the target files happen to be on different servers, but I'm not sure how you'd make sure they were on different servers in order to increase capacity, unless you effectively raid-1 your data across all servers. Even then, you'd need some way of round-robining that's consistent across all clients.

I may be wrong here, mainly thinking out loud!

Marcus


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