nodatacow

Log-dedicated loop device throughput and time overhead on btrfs 4.x

This is again about real world numbers (which I like so much for being authentic ;-). The context being the throughput and time overhead of a loop device, as a poor or late man’s replacement for a real disk partition, jep I know, on copy-on-write filesystem btrfs, exclusively dedicated for logging, that is appending over and over. Why? The loop device may overflow with data without affecting the underlying filesystem, see Btrfs subvolume quota still in its infancy with btrfs version 4.2.2 for more why’s and what I tried to get btrfs subvolume with quota to work. By the way, about that though, see debian org Btrfs for a down-to-earth assessment of btrfs to date, even uttering a recommendation from what version number (4.4) to start off at the earliest near production. Anyway, what follows, adapts a test setup as in Performance of loopback filesystems, prime credits go there, and expands the layout somewhat for the btrfs C or nodatacow flag. Here we go.

Have this baseline, if you like, test on the raw iron. Well, its not raw iron really, its vmware and tons of storage below, and the shown performance is terrible I know and I only take one testset of bs / count but that won’t matter. There’s something to start off.

mkdir /tmp/loop0
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=/tmp/loop0/file oflag=sync count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 8.9605 s, 117 MB/s
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 6.52867 s, 161 MB/s
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 5.35716 s, 196 MB/s
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 5.48745 s, 191 MB/s
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 5.14736 s, 204 MB/s

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Btrfs subvolume quota still in its infancy with btrfs version 4.2.2

Ever tried to dive into the btrfs subvolume topic, especially in combination with quotas (not snapshots here)? Looks really promising… administring subvolumes in hierarchies automagically offers managing quotas on (summed up) top- and on (dedicated) sub-levels by design, see : Btrfs SysadminGuide Subvolumes or Btrfs: Subvolumes and snapshots for example. With the later 4.x kernels there is btrfs 4.2.2, representing a huge step forward in btrfs development, so thought to give it another try on a red hat / oracle uek based 7.2 system.

Following, I’m going to show what I attempted to achive, the how-to’s, the workarounds I tried and, intermixed, the quite odd behaviour that I observed. Odd to an magnitude, that makes me recommed everyone to stay averse against employing this promising but still semifinished (?) technology.

The setup of a subvolume, dedicated for quota control is quite easy and takes only a couple of keystrokes. Understand though, that quota control with btrfs can only be enabled throughout the entire filesystem but can then be set to a value dedicatetly.

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