[gpfsug-discuss] Use AFM for migration of many small files

Peter Childs p.childs at qmul.ac.uk
Thu Jan 4 11:16:57 GMT 2018


We are doing something very similar using 4.2.3-4 and GPFS 4.2.1-1 on the nfs backend. Did you have any success?

The plan is to load the new cache from the old GPFS then dump once the cache is full.

We've already increase numThreashThreads from 4 to 8 and seen only marginal improvements, we could attempt to increase this further.

I'm also wondering if its worth increasing the Refresh Intervals to speed up read of already cache files. At this stage we want to fill the cache and don't care about write back until we switch the target to the new NFS/GPFS from our old GPFS storage to a new box back at our off-site location, (otherwise known as the office)

[root at afmgateway1<mailto:root at afmgateway1> scratch]# mmlsfileset home home -L --afm
Filesets in file system 'home':

Attributes for fileset home:
=============================
Status                                  Linked
Path                                    /data2/home
Id                                      42
Root inode                              1343225859
Parent Id                               0
Created                                 Wed Jan  3 12:32:33 2018
Comment
Inode space                             41
Maximum number of inodes                100000000
Allocated inodes                        15468544
Permission change flag                  chmodAndSetacl
afm-associated                          Yes
Target                                  nfs://afm1/gpfs/data1/afm/home
Mode                                    single-writer
File Lookup Refresh Interval            30 (default)
File Open Refresh Interval              30 (default)
Dir Lookup Refresh Interval             60 (default)
Dir Open Refresh Interval               60 (default)
Async Delay                             15 (default)
Last pSnapId                            0
Display Home Snapshots                  no
Number of Gateway Flush Threads         8
Prefetch Threshold                      0 (default)
Eviction Enabled                        no

Thanks in advance.

Peter Childs



On Tue, 2017-09-05 at 19:57 +0530, Venkateswara R Puvvada wrote:
Which version of Spectrum Scale ? What is the fileset mode ?

>We use AFM prefetch to migrate data between two clusters (using NFS). This works fine with large files, say 1+GB. But we have millions of smaller files,  about 1MB each. Here >I see just ~150MB/s – compare this to the 1000+MB/s we get for larger files.

How was the performance measured ? If parallel IO is enabled, AFM uses multiple gateway nodes to prefetch the large files (if file size if more than 1GB). Performance difference between small and lager file is huge (1000MB - 150MB = 850MB) here, and generally it is not the case. How many files were present in list file for prefetch ? Could you also share full internaldump from the gateway node ?

>I assume that we would need more parallelism, does prefetch pull just one file at a time? So each file needs  some or many metadata operations plus a single  or just a few >read and writes. Doing this sequentially adds up all the latencies of NFS+GPFS. This is my explanation. With larger files gpfs prefetch on home will help.

AFM prefetches the files on multiple threads. Default flush threads for prefetch are 36 (fileset.afmNumFlushThreads (default 4) + afmNumIOFlushThreads (default 32)).

>Please can anybody comment: Is this right, does AFM prefetch handle one file at a time in a sequential manner? And is there any way to change this behavior? Or am I wrong and >I need to look elsewhere to get better performance for prefetch of many smaller files?

See above, AFM reads files on multiple threads parallelly.  Try increasing the afmNumFlushThreads on fileset and verify if it improves the performance.

~Venkat (vpuvvada at in.ibm.com)



From:        "Billich Heinrich Rainer (PSI)" <heiner.billich at psi.ch>
To:        "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date:        09/04/2017 10:18 PM
Subject:        [gpfsug-discuss] Use AFM for migration of many small files
Sent by:        gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org



Hello,



We use AFM prefetch to migrate data between two clusters (using NFS). This works fine with large files, say 1+GB. But we have millions of smaller files,  about 1MB each. Here I see just ~150MB/s – compare this to the 1000+MB/s we get for larger files.



I assume that we would need more parallelism, does prefetch pull just one file at a time? So each file needs  some or many metadata operations plus a single  or just a few read and writes. Doing this sequentially adds up all the latencies of NFS+GPFS. This is my explanation. With larger files gpfs prefetch on home will help.



Please can anybody comment: Is this right, does AFM prefetch handle one file at a time in a sequential manner? And is there any way to change this behavior? Or am I wrong and I need to look elsewhere to get better performance for prefetch of many smaller files?



We will migrate several filesets in parallel, but still with individual filesets up to 350TB in size 150MB/s isn’t fun. Also just about 150 files/s seconds looks poor.



The setup is quite new, hence there may be other places to look at.

It’s all RHEL7 an spectrum scale 4.2.2-3 on the afm cache.



Thank you,



Heiner

--,

Paul Scherrer Institut

Science IT

Heiner Billich

WHGA 106

CH 5232  Villigen PSI

056 310 36 02

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Peter Childs
ITS Research Storage
Queen Mary, University of London

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