XFS Stride / Stripe Alignment Primer?

J

JoeKillaMofo

n00b
Joined
May 12, 2011
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Anyone know of an in-depth setup primer for an advanced File System newbie? That only sounds a little contradictory right? After much Googling I have come across a number of different sites but none address and explain the issue in full, some hit on it only slightly while others only go into smaller specific details...

Basically I am looking for a primer that goes (quickly) through the setup theory (general do's and don'ts) and then some overall stripe alignment and then ideally goes into the specifics of it (logging settings), possibly even some common scenario's (raid controllers, some OS specifics, etc).

Having very little experience with it combined with the info on it being somewhat sparse and just a little cryptic I am finding setting up an optimized XFS system to be quite the challenge.

TL;DR: XFS omg help pls! wat is a stripe!?!

J
 
Do you have any reason to believe that the defaults are not good for you? Not trying to be snarky, but 99% of the users don't really need to tweak things like stride, log settings, etc...
 
danswartz said:
Do you have any reason to believe that the defaults are not good for you? Not trying to be snarky, but 99% of the users don't really need to tweak things like stride, log settings, etc...
Click to expand...

It's a production file server with a 10GigE card, I wouldn't care if it was for home use on a 1Gig connection, but I want to make damn sure I can saturate that card, and at some point it would be nice to add a second card (if when LAG is available for 10GigE or 40/100GigE cards hit the market here soon) and be able to pump the full raid bandwidth out of both cards (rough guess ~500MBps in total).

I have little to no experience with 10GigE yet so I don't know much actual throughput I am going to see off the NIC but the Areca raid controller behind the array should easily handle ~+800MBps reads or so (this machines job is just serving up very large file sequences).
 
AFAIK, only very unusual I/O requirements would care about non-default XFS settings. Give it a try and see how it works. If you run into a bottleneck that is provably the FS, you can revisit the issue, no?
 
danswartz said:
AFAIK, only very unusual I/O requirements would care about non-default XFS settings. Give it a try and see how it works. If you run into a bottleneck that is provably the FS, you can revisit the issue, no?
Click to expand...

True enough, I just started reading about XFS and saw people saying things like "30-40% speed increase with a properly setup stride" and was like "Yeah ok I probably want that."

Also since this file server is serving quite specific and unchanging files I figured really getting in there and tweaking XFS settings would give it a doubly nice boost.
 
Might or might not, but only matters if that is the gating factor and not net saturation.
 
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