ZFS prefers iSCSI disks over local ones ?

Ben RUBSON ben.rubson at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 15:40:25 UTC 2017


> On 03 Oct 2017, at 17:18, Gary Palmer <gpalmer at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 05:03:18PM +0200, Ben RUBSON wrote:
>>> On 03 Oct 2017, at 16:58, Steven Hartland <steven at multiplay.co.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 03/10/2017 15:40, Ben RUBSON wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I start a new thread to avoid confusion in the main one.
>>>> (ZFS stalled after some mirror disks were lost)
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On 03 Oct 2017, at 09:39, Steven Hartland wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 03/10/2017 08:31, Ben RUBSON wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On 03 Oct 2017, at 09:25, Steven Hartland wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On 03/10/2017 07:12, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On 02/10/2017 21:12, Ben RUBSON wrote:
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On a FreeBSD 11 server, the following online/healthy zpool :
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> home
>>>>>>>>> mirror-0
>>>>>>>>>   label/local1
>>>>>>>>>   label/local2
>>>>>>>>>   label/iscsi1
>>>>>>>>>   label/iscsi2
>>>>>>>>> mirror-1
>>>>>>>>>   label/local3
>>>>>>>>>   label/local4
>>>>>>>>>   label/iscsi3
>>>>>>>>>   label/iscsi4
>>>>>>>>> cache
>>>>>>>>> label/local5
>>>>>>>>> label/local6
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> A sustained read throughput of 180 MB/s, 45 MB/s on each iscsi disk
>>>>>>>>> according to "zpool iostat", nothing on local disks (strange but I
>>>>>>>>> noticed that IOs always prefer iscsi disks to local disks).
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Are your local disks SSD or HDD?
>>>>>>>> Could it be that iSCSI disks appear to be faster than the local disks
>>>>>>>> to the smart ZFS mirror code?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Steve, what do you think?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Yes that quite possible, the mirror balancing uses the queue depth +
>>>>>>> rotating bias to determine the load of the disk so if your iSCSI host
>>>>>>> is processing well and / or is reporting non-rotating vs rotating for
>>>>>>> the local disks it could well be the mirror is preferring reads from
>>>>>>> the the less loaded iSCSI devices.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Note that local & iscsi disks are _exactly_ the same HDD (same model number,
>>>>>> same SAS adapter...). So iSCSI ones should be a little bit slower due to
>>>>>> network latency (even if it's very low in my case).
>>>>>> 
>>>>> The output from gstat -dp on a loaded machine would be interesting to see too.
>>>>> 
>>>> So here is the gstat -dp :
>>>> 
>>>> L(q) ops/s  r/s  kBps ms/r w/s kBps ms/w d/s kBps ms/d %busy Name
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da0
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da1
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da2
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da3
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da4
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da5
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da6
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da7
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da8
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da9
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da10
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da11
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da12
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da13
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da14
>>>>   1   370  370 47326  0.7   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0 23.2| da15
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da16
>>>>   0   357  357 45698  1.4   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0 39.3| da17
>>>>   0   348  348 44572  0.7   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0 22.5| da18
>>>>   0   432  432 55339  0.7   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0 27.5| da19
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da20
>>>>   0     0    0     0  0.0   0    0  0.0   0    0  0.0  0.0| da21
>>>> 
>>>> The 4 active drives are the iSCSI targets of the above quoted pool.
>>>> 
>>>> A local disk :
>>>> 
>>>> Geom name: da7
>>>> Providers:
>>>> 1. Name: da7
>>>>   Mediasize: 4000787030016 (3.6T)
>>>>   Sectorsize: 512
>>>>   Mode: r0w0e0
>>>>   descr: HGSTxxx
>>>>   lunid: 5000xxx
>>>>   ident: NHGDxxx
>>>>   rotationrate: 7200
>>>>   fwsectors: 63
>>>>   fwheads: 255
>>>> 
>>>> A iSCSI disk :
>>>> 
>>>> Geom name: da19
>>>> Providers:
>>>> 1. Name: da19
>>>>   Mediasize: 3999688294912 (3.6T)
>>>>   Sectorsize: 512
>>>>   Mode: r1w1e2
>>>>   descr: FREEBSD CTLDISK
>>>>   lunname: FREEBSD MYDEVID  12
>>>>   lunid: FREEBSD MYDEVID  12
>>>>   ident: iscsi4
>>>>   rotationrate: 0
>>>>   fwsectors: 63
>>>>   fwheads: 255
>>>> 
>>>> Sounds like then the faulty thing is the rotationrate set to 0 ?
>>> 
>>> Absolutely
>> 
>> Good catch then, thank you !
>> 
>>> and from the looks you're not stressing the iSCSI disks so they get high queuing depths hence the preference.
>>> As load increased I would expect the local disks to start seeing activity.
>> 
>> Yes this is also what I see.
>> 
>> Any way however to set rotationrate to 7200 (or to a slightly greater value) as well for iSCSI drives ?
>> I looked through ctl.conf(5) and iscsi.conf(5) but did not found anything related.
>> 
>> Many thanks !
> 
> Use the "option" setting in ctl.conf to change the rpm value (documented
> in the OPTIONS section of ctladm(8)).

Thank you also Gary, and sorry as your mail went to spam :/

Ben



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