As we have listed on the staff wiki, you will have the primary responsibility for this project. We had the ori ginal start date on this project as last Monday (9/12), so we're already a bit behind schedule. Anything you c an do to get this going sooner rather than later will be appreciated. A few notes on Gail's email... On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:18 PM, Gail A. Binkley wrote: > Here are the variations I think we should test: > > Filesystems: ext3 vs. xfs > Disk configurations (2x146GB disks mirrored for OS and 6x600GB disks for data/database): > 1. RAID10 (3x3) > 2. RAID5 (6 disks) > 3. RAID5 + RAID0: 4 disks RAID5, 2 disks RAID0 (WAL logs) Since these tests do not involve the boot disks, you will probably only need to Kickstart the system once. XFS is not a standard part of our Kickstart build, so you'll need to install that separately once the machine has been Kickstarted. Since each RAID configuration requires a non-trivial amount of time to build, you'll be bes t off if you test each filesystem on the RAID volume before changing the RAID configuration. You'll get a mess age during boot time which tells you the keystroke combination to type to edit the RAID configuration. (I thin k it's ctrl-R.) So you'll need to be on the console via the KVM when you are ready to edit the RAID configurat ion. > General settings for all tests: > data=ordered > noatime > nobarrier (on xfs if have a battery-backed write controller) > blockdev --setra 4096 /dev/sda (set write-ahead on each drive) It may be easier to set these in the /etc/fstab file. Remember that some flags may be applicable only to one t ype of filesystem, so if you have say XFS flags set when you're about to mount an ext3 filesystem, the volume may not mount at all. > Benchmarking software: > 1. dstat (replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, and ifstat) > 2. bonnie++ 1.03 (http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/) /usr/local/sbin/bonnie++ -s 2048 -d /data/bontest -u root -m yeastmine -n 100 | /usr/local/bin/bon_csv2txt > / tmp/bon_test.txt ./bonnie++ -f -n 0 | tee `hostname`.bonnie chmod +x ./bon_csv2html cat `hostname`.bonnie | grep "," | ./bon_csv2html > `hostname`.html /usr/local/sbin/bonnie++ -s 96g -d /data -u root -m sgd-virt -n 100 | tee `hostname`.bonnie cat `hostname`.bonnie | grep "," | ./bon_csv2html > `hostname`.html -s = the size of files -d = the directory you want tested, can do multiple -u = user use root if need be but not recommended -m = hostname -n = number of files to create bon_csv2txt = the converter from csv to txt there is an html as well. > 3. sysbench (version .4.12 has bugs, http://sourceforge.net/projects/sysbench/files/sysbench/0.4.10/) > 4. pgbench (comes with Postgresql) > > What is the current configuration of the new machines called yeastmine? > Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? I would like to these tests running ASAP, this week if possi ble. > > - Gail Hopefully you can take care of this soon. If you have questions about this, please don't hesitate to contact e ither Gail or me, depending on who is more appropriate for the nature of the question. We'll probably need to discuss things like disk mount points, for example. ### first setup ### cat /proc/version cat /proc/cpuinfo cat /proc/meminfo cat /etc/redhat-release redhat version 5.5 (2.6.18-194.el5) ext3 filesystem RAID ? general settings default is: rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async. and relatime. 1data=ordered?? on noatime relatime is the default. now they have same atime values with 0 overhead . relatime is the default on all redhat now. nobarrier?? write cache preserves data in power failure etc, nobarrier will allow better performance. but how to know if it is there or not? write-ahead setting?? writeback? for data=ordered, writeback, jopurnal http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2008/05/15/recommended-mount-options-for-ext3/ ### this is some info on how noatime and some configuring.