Gluster can have trouble delivering good performance for small file workloads. This problem is acute for features such as tiering and RDMA, which employ expensive hardware such as SSDs or infiniband. In such workloads the hardware’s benefits are unrealized, so there is little return on the investment. A major contributing factor to this problem has …Read more

This post describes recent tests done by Red Hat on an 84 node gluster volume.  Our experiments measured performance characteristics and management behavior. To our knowledge, this is the largest performance test ever done under controlled conditions within the organization (we have heard of larger clusters in the community but do not know any details about them). Red Hat officially …Read more

This post shares some experiences I’ve had in simulating a block device in gluster. The block device is a file based image, which acts as the backend for the Linux SCSI target. The file resides in gluster, so enjoys gluster’s feature set. But the client only sees a block device. The Linux SCSI target presents …Read more

Last  Saturday on 14th September’13 I gave on GlusterFS presentation at LSPE-IN. The title for the presentation was Performance Characterization in Large distributed file system with GlusterFS . Few days before the talk I looked at the attendee list to get  the … Continue reading →

(This was originally posted on our Q&A site at community.gluster.org) Problem: VERY slow performance when using ‘bedtools’ and other apps that write zillions of small output chunks. If this was a self-writ app or an infrequently used one, I wouldn’t bother writing this up, but ‘bedtools’ is a fairly popular genomics app and since many …Read more