[dm-devel] Performance issue when building thin-pool on top of RAID6 device

[Teng-Feng Yang]

Hi,

Sorry, I forget to provide more information on my system configuration.
I use Ubuntu 13.10 and update linux kernel to 3.13.3.

The dmsetup table output should be similar in all experiments as follow:
thin: 0 80000000 thin 252:0 0
pool: 0 117433344 thin-pool 8:145 9:0 2048 0 1 skip_block_zeroing

Thanks,
Dennis

2014-02-18 17:34 GMT+08:00 Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac at redhat.com>:
> Dne 18.2.2014 10:13, Teng-Feng Yang napsal(a):
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I have been working on tuning the dm-thin performance on my storage
>> server.
>> I surprisingly find out that the write performance of newly created
>> thin volume formatted as EXT4 has degraded significantly, when
>> building thin-pool on top of RAID6 device.
>> Thin pools in all experiment use 1MB block size, and I format all
>> target volumes as EXT4 and mount them on /mnt.
>> The following is the performance statistics I gather under different
>> circumstances.
>>
>> Thin volume on top of a thin pool created by a Plextor M5P 128GB SSD
>> as metadata device
>> and a RAID6 block device composed by 7 disks (chunk size = 512KB) as a
>> data device
>> dennis at desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zero.img bs=1M count=25000
>> 25000+0 records in
>> 25000+0 records out
>> 26214400000 bytes (26 GB) copied, 245.808 s, 107 MB/s
>>
>> Directly make filesystem on RAID6 block device composed by 7 disks
>> dennis at desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zero.img bs=1M count=25000
>> 25000+0 records in
>> 25000+0 records out
>> 26214400000 bytes (26 GB) copied, 129.543 s, 202 MB/s
>>
>> Thin volume on top of a thin pool created by a Plextor M5P 128GB SSD
>> as metadata device
>> and a RAID0 block device composed by 7 disks as a data device
>> dennis at desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zero.img bs=1M count=25000
>> 25000+0 records in
>> 25000+0 records out
>> 26214400000 bytes (26 GB) copied, 46.1227 s, 568 MB/s
>>
>> Directly make filesystem on RAID6 block device composed by 7 disks
>> dennis at desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zero.img bs=1M count=25000
>> 25000+0 records in
>> 25000+0 records out
>> 26214400000 bytes (26 GB) copied, 48.1104 s, 545 MB/s
>>
>> It is clear that the write performance has degraded significantly when
>> we use RAID6 as thin-pool,
>> but there is no similar behavior when using RAID0 as thin-pool instead.
>> I dig a little deeper on this issue and find that if we can perfectly
>> fit a pool block into a RAID6 stripe,
>> there would be only 20~30% performance loss comparing to RAW RAID6.
>> However, this poses a restriction on the disks number we can use to
>> build a RAID6 for pool, and limit the maximum pool size as well.
>> Is there any other way I can do to improve the write performance when
>> using RAID6 as pool?
>
>
>
> Since you have not provided any  'dmsetup table' output - it's hard to guess
> how your thin-pool target is created, but my guess is - you are using
> 'zeroing' for provisioned blocks.
>
> i.e. here is some sample for thin-pool target line with disabled zeroing:
>
> vg-pool-tpool: 0 40960 thin-pool 253:1 253:2 128 0 1 skip_block_zeroing
>
>
> (and example of lvm2 command line:  'lvcreate -T -L100G -Zn -c1M vg/pool'
>
> Zdenek
>