Hi all,
We are running CentOS 5.2 64bit as our file server. Currently, we used GFS (with CLVM underneath it) as our filesystem (for our multiple 2TB SAN volume exports) since we plan to add more file servers (serving the same contents) later on.
The issue we are facing at the moment is we found out that command such as 'ls' gives a very slow response.(e.g 3-4minutes for the outputs of ls to be printed out, or in certain cases, 20minutes or so) This is completely true especially in directories containing "large number" of small files (e.g 90000+ of 1-4kb files). The thing is, most of system users are generating these small files frequently as part of their workflow.
We tried emulating the same scenario (90000+ of small files) on a ext3 partition and it gives almost the same result.
I believe most of the CLVM/GFS settings done are using the defaults parameters. Additionally, we would prefer to stick to GFS (or at least ext3) as it is part of CentOS / RHEL distribution rather than changing into other small-files 'friendly' filesystems (such as XFS, ReiserFS).
I'm exploring whether is there anyway we can tune the GFS parameters to make the system more responsive? I have read that we can apply 'dir_index' option to ext3 partition to speedup things, but I'm not so sure about GFS.
Below are the output from "gfs_tool gettune /export/gfs" :
ilimit1 = 100 ilimit1_tries = 3 ilimit1_min = 1 ilimit2 = 500 ilimit2_tries = 10 ilimit2_min = 3 demote_secs = 300 incore_log_blocks = 1024 jindex_refresh_secs = 60 depend_secs = 60 scand_secs = 5 recoverd_secs = 60 logd_secs = 1 quotad_secs = 5 inoded_secs = 15 glock_purge = 0 quota_simul_sync = 64 quota_warn_period = 10 atime_quantum = 3600 quota_quantum = 60 quota_scale = 1.0000 (1, 1) quota_enforce = 1 quota_account = 1 new_files_jdata = 0 new_files_directio = 0 max_atomic_write = 4194304 max_readahead = 262144 lockdump_size = 131072 stall_secs = 600 complain_secs = 10 reclaim_limit = 5000 entries_per_readdir = 32 prefetch_secs = 10 statfs_slots = 64 max_mhc = 10000 greedy_default = 100 greedy_quantum = 25 greedy_max = 250 rgrp_try_threshold = 100 statfs_fast = 0
TIA.
.ikmal