[
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3248?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13138101#comment-13138101
]
Peter Schuller commented on CASSANDRA-3248:
-------------------------------------------
Empirically (but anecdotally), the idea of consumer SATA disks breaking the
write barrier promise seems grossly overstated. All my performance testing that
I have ever done on consumer disks have been consistent with write barriers
propagating, so in those cases at least it is not consistently and by design
ignoring it (but there may be bugs still of course). I've also done (limited)
crash testing w/ ZFS (propagates barriers, doesn't disable cache). That's part
of why I thought it was interesting if Brandon had run into one (but in this
case it seems like md is the problem).
> CommitLog writer should call fdatasync instead of fsync
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CASSANDRA-3248
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-3248
> Project: Cassandra
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Core
> Affects Versions: 0.6.13, 0.7.9, 0.8.6, 1.0.0, 1.1
> Environment: Linux
> Reporter: Zhu Han
> Assignee: Brandon Williams
> Original Estimate: 48h
> Remaining Estimate: 48h
>
> CommitLogSegment uses SequentialWriter to flush the buffered data to log
> device. It depends on FileDescriptor#sync() which invokes fsync() as it force
> the file attributes to disk.
> However, at least on Linux, fdatasync() is good enough for commit log flush:
> bq. fdatasync() is similar to fsync(), but does not flush modified metadata
> unless that metadata is needed in order to allow a subsequent data retrieval
> to be correctly handled. For example, changes to st_atime or st_mtime
> (respectively, time of last access and time of last modification; see
> stat(2)) do not require flushing because they are not necessary for a
> subsequent data read to be handled correctly. On the other hand, a change to
> the file size (st_size, as made by say ftruncate(2)), would require a
> metadata flush.
> File size is synced to disk by fdatasync() either. Although the commit log
> recovery logic sorts the commit log segements on their modify timestamp, it
> can be removed safely, IMHO.
> I checked the native code of JRE 6. On Linux and Solaris,
> FileChannel#force(false) invokes fdatasync(). On windows, the false flag does
> not have any impact.
> On my log device (commodity SATA HDD, write cache disabled), there is large
> performance gap between fsync() and fdatasync():
> {quote}
> $sysbench --test=fileio --num-threads=1 --file-num=1 --file-total-size=10G
> --file-fsync-all=on --file-fsync-mode={color:red}fdatasync{color}
> --file-test-mode=seqwr --max-time=600 --file-block-size=2K --max-requests=0
> run
> {color:blue}54.90{color} Requests/sec executed
> per-request statistics:
> min: 8.29ms
> avg: 18.18ms
> max: 108.36ms
> approx. 95 percentile: 25.02ms
> $ sysbench --test=fileio --num-threads=1 --file-num=1 --file-total-size=10G
> --file-fsync-all=on --file-fsync-mode={color:red}fsync{color}
> --file-test-mode=seqwr --max-time=600 --file-block-size=2K --max-requests=0
> run
> {color:blue}28.08{color} Requests/sec executed
> per-request statistics:
> min: 33.28ms
> avg: 35.61ms
> max: 911.87ms
> approx. 95 percentile: 41.69ms
> {quote}
> I do think this is a very critical performance improvement.
--
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ContactAdministrators!default.jspa
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
