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Date:      Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:19:22 -0700
From:      David Brodbeck <gull@gull.us>
To:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: what happens to pool if ZIL dies on ZFS v14
Message-ID:  <AANLkTi=O26MxE_8kEk_Es7H=QZDVbE5bypT2XvkurAoY@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTik00NQX=FiUemGBKdogXUQHPS2rvT-XSV30VCNq@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <AANLkTi=vYVG300nhMjkcLju=kQhBdPJDqyaXR0mG84%2Bp@mail.gmail.com> <4C9385B0.2080909@shatow.net> <AANLkTin0LwQz%2BWi5cBOcHuVqyOz3%2BfFR7YC_=f2L5CyX@mail.gmail.com> <AANLkTinbPK1rNK5hg=t7N=sqFLuh8sNrZT9DFC_ppXWF@mail.gmail.com> <20100917161847.GA58503@icarus.home.lan> <AANLkTikEgrFGGUVUW8dQWGH44K41jPG=PwXXzsT5fYdV@mail.gmail.com> <201009221300.o8MD0Cbm030033@higson.cam.lispworks.com> <AANLkTik00NQX=FiUemGBKdogXUQHPS2rvT-XSV30VCNq@mail.gmail.com>

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On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 10:14 AM, David Brodbeck <gull@gull.us> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 6:00 AM, Martin Simmons <martin@lispworks.com> wr=
ote:
>>>>>>> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:38:22 -0700, David Brodbeck said:
>>>
>>> If you don't have a separate log device, synchronous writes are very
>>> slow with the ZIL enabled. =A0This isn't such a big deal unless you're
>>> using NFS, where essentially every write is synchronous.
>>
>> Is that true for all versions of NFS? =A0In my experience (on 8.0-RELEAS=
E),
>> NFSv2 is indeed synchronous, but NFSv3 does asynchronous flushing (for a
>> variety of different client OSes).
>
> It does allow clients to request asynchronous flushing. =A0My statement
> that "essentially every write is synchronous" was a bit of an
> overstatement; the problem comes when the client issues a COMMIT,
> which happens frequently when doing some operations, such as
> extracting tar files. =A0These are the operations that can get quite
> slow when using NFS with the ZIL enabled and no separate log device.
> By "quite slow," I mean several minutes to extract a tar file that
> takes less than a minute with the ZIL disabled.

I should add that there's a very good, if somewhat
OpenSolaris-centric, explanation of the issue here:
http://blogs.sun.com/roch/entry/nfs_and_zfs_a_fine

The problem shows up more with ZFS because it enforces proper cache
semantics, while many other filesystems do not.  This isn't always a
satisfactory explanation to users who expect to be able to untar files
in a reasonable amount of time, however. ;)



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