My NFS setup is a heartbeat setup on two servers running Active/Passive DRBD. The NFS servers themselves are 1x 2 core Opterons with 8G ram and 5TB space with 16 drives and a 3ware controller. They're connected to a HP procurve switch with bonded ethernet. The sync-rates between the two DRBD nodes seem to safely reach 200Mbps or better. The processors on the active NFS servers run with a load of 0.2, so it seems mighty healthy. Until I do a serious backup.
I have a few load balanced web nodes and two database nodes as NFS clients. When I start backing up my database to a mounted NFS partition, a plain rsync drives the NFS box through the roof and forces a failover. I can do my backup using --bwlimit=1500, but then I'm not anywhere close to a fast backup, just 1.5MBps. My backups are probably 40G. (The database has fast disks and between database copies I see run at up to 60MBps - close to 500Mbps). I obviously do not have a networking issue.
The processor loads up like this: bwlimit 1500 load 2.3 bwlimit 2500 load 3.5 bwlimit 4500 load 5.5+
The DRBD secondary seems to run at about 1/2 the load of the primary.
What I'm wondering is--why is this thing *so* load sensitive? Is it DRBD? Is it NFS? I'm guessing that since I only have two cores in the NFS boxes that a prolonged transfer makes NFS dominates 1 core and DRBD dominate the next, and so I'm saturating my processor.
Thots?
Jed