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Date:      Sun, 3 Jul 2016 15:24:56 -0700
From:      Jordan Hubbard <jkh@ixsystems.com>
To:        Julien Cigar <julien@perdition.city>
Cc:        Ben RUBSON <ben.rubson@gmail.com>, freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: HAST + ZFS + NFS + CARP
Message-ID:  <65906F84-CFFC-40E9-8236-56AFB6BE2DE1@ixsystems.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160703214723.GF41276@mordor.lan>
References:  <20160630144546.GB99997@mordor.lan> <71b8da1e-acb2-9d4e-5d11-20695aa5274a@internetx.com> <AD42D8FD-D07B-454E-B79D-028C1EC57381@gmail.com> <20160630153747.GB5695@mordor.lan> <63C07474-BDD5-42AA-BF4A-85A0E04D3CC2@gmail.com> <678321AB-A9F7-4890-A8C7-E20DFDC69137@gmail.com> <20160630185701.GD5695@mordor.lan> <6035AB85-8E62-4F0A-9FA8-125B31A7A387@gmail.com> <20160703192945.GE41276@mordor.lan> <20160703214723.GF41276@mordor.lan>

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> On Jul 3, 2016, at 2:47 PM, Julien Cigar <julien@perdition.city> =
wrote:
>=20
> I guess that ZFS will split the read requests accross all devices in
> order to maximize performance... which could lead to contrary to what =
is
> expecpted when iSCSI disks are involved, no?
> Is there some sysctl params which could prevent this unexpected
> behavior?

Nope.  You will suffer the performance implications of layering a =
filesystem that expects =E2=80=9Crotating media or SSDs=E2=80=9D (with =
the innate ability to parallelize multiple requests in a way that ADD =
performance) on top of a system which is now serializing the requests =
across an internet connection to another software layer which may offer =
no performance benefits to having multiple LUNs at all.   You can try =
iSCSI-specific tricks like MPIO to try and increase performance, but ZFS =
itself is just going to treat everything it sees as =E2=80=9Ca disk=E2=80=9D=
 and so physical concepts like mirrors or multiple vdevs for performance =
won=E2=80=99t translate across.

Example question: What=E2=80=99s the point of writing multiple copies of =
data across virtual disks in a mirror configuration if the underlying =
storage for the virtual disks is already redundant and the I/Os to it =
serialize?
Example Answer: There is no point.  In fact, it=E2=80=99s a =
pessimization to do so.

This is not a lot different than running ZFS on top of RAID controllers =
that turn N physical disks into 1 or more virtual disks.  You have to =
make entirely different performance decisions based on such scenarios =
and that=E2=80=99s just the way it is, which is also why we don=E2=80=99t =
recommend doing that.

- Jordan




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