Is XFS suitable for 350 million files on 20TB storage?

[Stefan Priebe]

Am 05.09.2014 21:18, schrieb Brian Foster:
...

> On Fri, Sep 05, 2014 at 08:07:38PM +0200, Stefan Priebe wrote:
> Interesting, that seems like a lot of free inodes. That's 1-2 million in
> each AG that we have to look around for each time we want to allocate an
> inode. I can't say for sure that's the source of the slowdown, but this
> certainly looks like the kind of workload that inspired the addition of
> the free inode btree (finobt) to more recent kernels.
>
> It appears that you still have quite a bit of space available in
> general. Could you run some local tests on this filesystem to try and
> quantify how much of this degradation manifests on sustained writes vs.
> file creation? For example, how is throughput when writing a few GB to a
> local test file?

Not sure if this is what you expect:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile oflag=direct,sync bs=4M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4,2 GB) copied, 125,809 s, 33,3 MB/s

or without sync
# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile oflag=direct bs=4M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4,2 GB) copied, 32,5474 s, 129 MB/s

 > How about with that same amount of data broken up
> across a few thousand files?

This results in heavy kworker usage.

4GB in 32kb files
# time (mkdir test; for i in $(seq 1 1 131072); do dd if=/dev/zero 
of=test/$i bs=32k count=1 oflag=direct,sync 2>/dev/null; done)

...

55 min

> Brian
>
> P.S., Alternatively if you wanted to grab a metadump of this filesystem
> and compress/upload it somewhere, I'd be interested to take a look at
> it.

I think there might be file and directory names in it. If this is the 
case i can't do it.

Stefan


>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Stefan
>>
>>
>>
>>> Brian
>>>
>>>>> ... as well as what your typical workflow/dataset is for this fs. It
>>>>> seems like you have relatively small files (15TB used across 350m files
>>>>> is around 46k per file), yes?
>>>>
>>>> Yes - most fo them are even smaller. And some files are > 5GB.
>>>>
>>>>> If so, I wonder if something like the
>>>>> following commit introduced in 3.12 would help:
>>>>>
>>>>> 133eeb17 xfs: don't use speculative prealloc for small files
>>>>
>>>> Looks interesting.
>>>>
>>>> Stefan