Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 18 Nov 2013 18:16:01 -0700
From:      Eric Browning <ericbrowning@skaggscatholiccenter.org>
To:        FreeBSD FS <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Performance difference between UFS and ZFS with NFS
Message-ID:  <CAM=5oeCoj63hLmJq6hU6VKwf2bnGgbYNNY-yH9LisEs_wf4Bqg@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Some background:
-Two identical servers, dual AMD Athlon 6220's 16 cores total @ 3Ghz,
-64GB ram each server
-Four Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs for primary storage, each server.
-FreeBSD 9 stable as of 902503
-ZFS v28 and later updated to feature flags (v29?)
-LSI 9200-8i controller
-Intel I350T4 nic (only one port being used currently) using all four in
LACP overtaxed the server's NFS queue from what we found out making the
server basically unusable.

There is definitely something going on between NFS and ZFS when used as a
file server (random workload) for mac home directories.  They do not jive
well at all and pretty much drag down these beefy servers and cause 20-30
second delays when just attempting to list a directory on Mac 10.7, 10.8
clients although throughput seems fast when copying files.

This server's NFS was sitting north of 700% (7+ cores) all day long when
using ZFSv28 raidz1. I have also tried stripe, compression on/off, sync
enabled/disabled, and no dedup with 56GB of ram dedicated to ARC.  I've
tried just 100% stock settings in loader.conf and and some recommended
tuning from various sources on the freebsd lists and other sites including
the freebsd handbook.

This is my mountpoint creation:
zfs create -o mountpoint=/users -o sharenfs=on -o
casesensitivity=insensitive -o aclmode=passthrough -o compression=lz4 -o
atime=off -o aclinherit=passthrough tank/users

This last weekend I switched one of these servers over to a UFS raid 0
setup and NFS now only eats about 36% of one core during the initial login
phase of 150-ish users over about 10 minutes and sits under 1-3% during
normal usage and directories all list instantly even when drilling down 10
or so directories on the client's home files. The same NFS config on server
and clients are still active.

Right now I'm going to have to abandon ZFS until it works with NFS.  I
don't want to get into a finger pointing game, I'd just like to help get
this fixed, I have one old i386 server I can try things out on if that
helps and it's already on 9 stable and ZFS v28.

Thanks,
-- 
Eric Browning
Systems Administrator
801-984-7623

Skaggs Catholic Center
Juan Diego Catholic High School
Saint John the Baptist Middle
Saint John the Baptist Elementary



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?CAM=5oeCoj63hLmJq6hU6VKwf2bnGgbYNNY-yH9LisEs_wf4Bqg>