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Re: Very slow LVM performance



On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 05:13:16PM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> Arcady Genkin put forth on 7/12/2010 11:52 AM:
> > On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 02:05, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> lvcreate -i 10 -I [stripe_size] -l 102389 vg0
> >>
> >> I believe you're losing 10x performance because you have a 10 "disk" mdadm
> >> stripe but you didn't inform lvcreate about this fact.
> > 
> > Hi, Stan:
> > 
> > I believe that the -i and -I options are for using *LVM* to do the
> > striping, am I wrong?  
> 
> If this were the case, lvcreate would require the set of physical or pseudo
> (mdadm) device IDs to stripe across wouldn't it?  There are no options in
> lvcreate to specify physical or pseudo devices.  The only input to lvcreate is
> a volume group ID.  Therefor, lvcreate is ignorant of the physical devices
> underlying it, is it not?

Have a closer look at lvcreate(8).  The last arguments are:

       [-Z|--zero y|n] VolumeGroupName [PhysicalVolumePath[:PE[-PE]]...]

So after the VG, you can specify explicitly the exact PEs within
that VG to stripe across that the -I/-i options configure.

I'm unsure why one would necessarily /want/ to do that.  I run LVM
on top of md RAID1.  Here, I have a single PV on top of the RAID
array, and I can't see that adding additional striping on top of
that would benefit performance in any way.  I can only assume it
makes sense if you /don't/ have underlying RAID and want to tell
LVM to stripe over multiple PVs on different physical discs,
which /would/ have some performance impact since you spread the
I/O over multiple discs.

AFAICT the striping options are entirely pointless when layered on
RAID, and could be responsible for the performance issues if it
can have a negative impact (such as thrashing the disks if you
tell it to write multiple stripes to a single disc).


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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