Anyone using HAST in production / performance?

[Karl Pielorz]

Hi,

I've been looking at HAST for a while (I posted here a while ago about 
performance).

Is anyone using it in production? - How do you find the performance?

On a 10 stable box (Xeon 1230v3/16Gb/LSI2308/amd64) - even if I setup HAST 
for async, no compression, no crc - and 'none' for the other node on a 
disk, simply changing '/dev/gpt/partition' for '/dev/hast/partition' loses 
around 50% performance.

Running bonnie++ on a 'raw' UFS disk gives 133962K/sec. Same drive via HAST 
(with 'remote' set to none) drops to 72019K/sec. This was for a Crucial SSD 
(1Mbyte partition aligned). A SanDisk SSD shows a bigger drop from 
230Mbyte/sec writes to 90Mbyte/sec.

The same thing happens with regular spindle SATA disks as well (it makes 
their performance 'dismal'). Using the onboard SATA ports vs. the LSI 
doesn't make any difference either.

Interestingly, reconfiguring HAST with an actual secondary node doesn't 
show any more noticeable performance loss (other node is via a 10Gbit 
connection - and I have verified replication is happening).

It's just the initial change to HAST (even for a local, with no remote) 
that causes the huge hit. No combination of async, memsync etc. makes any 
difference.

By comparison - putting GELI atop of the raw disk (with hardware crypto) 
shows a performance fall of around 1-2%!

Any suggestions for what I can look at to check/change?

-Karl