Large directory performance bug? F760/6.1.2R3/Linux/2.4.20

From: Chris Miles (chris@psychofx.com)
Date: Thu Nov 13 2003 - 13:47:31 EST

  • Next message: Stephane Bentebba: "Re: Large directory performance bug? F760/6.1.2R3/Linux/2.4.20"

    Hi, we have over 20 webservers running a web application
    and serving all the data off a Netapp NFS mount. Netapp
    CPU normally sits at around 20-40% and NFS response is good.

    Today we hit what appears to have been a bug of some sort.
    All of a sudden, with no apparent increase in client connections,
    the F760 CPU went to 80-90% and the load on all the webservers
    rose sharply (from approx 0.5-1.5 up to 15-20). The site
    response went down the drain (20+ seconds for a page that
    normally takes under 1 second).

    It appeared to be caused by the application doing readdirs
    (along with other operations: read/write/getattr) on a specific
    directory, which at that time held about 70,000 files. We fixed
    the problem by disabling the readdirs within the application and
    also reducing the number of files in that directory down to
    about 45,000.

    We don't know exactly which fix (stopping readdirs or removing
    the files) did the trick, but after that Netapp CPU dropped back to
    normal and the webservers were happy and the site responsive
    again.

    It appeared that the combination of all the operations on the
    large directory were causing the NFS clients to hang and the
    Netapp CPU to max out. Although at the same time, other NFS
    operations were still performing at a reasonable speed (ie,
    the whole Netapp was not locked up).

    Any ideas on a bug or limitation on either the Linux or the
    Netapp side with regards to large (70,000+ files) directories?

    Info:
      Netapp F760C
      ONTAP 6.1.2R3

      Linux 2.4.20 (Redhat)
      Mount options: rw,hard,intr,vers=3,proto=tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768

    Cheers,
    Chris

    -- 
    Chris Miles
    http://chrismiles.info/
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 13 2003 - 13:53:28 EST