Using swapcache to speed up external disk writes?

[Matthew Dillon]

Swapcache will speed up accesses to the external disk very nicely, but not
have much of an effect on write performance.  But writes are already
buffered to some degree, and NFS clients usually flush modifies files on
close() for safety reasons (which might be why you see some latency).  That
can often be turned off on the client but I do not recommend doing so.

The main problem with USB-attached drives is that the I/Os are basically
serialized, so random access performance is going to be horrible.  For a
server you really need a SATA attached drive.  Swapcache will improve
random access performance though once things get cached.

Depending on the number of files you are storing verses the size of the
vnode cache on the server, you might want to turn on the
vfs.hammer.double_buffer feature (via sysctl).

To use swapcache, make sure a large amount of swap space is configured on
the SSD and then enable it via sysctl. Typical starting configuration is
something like the below.  'man swapcache' for more information.

vm.swapcache.use_chflags = 0
vm.swapcache.read_enable=1
vm.swapcache.meta_enable=1
vm.swapcache.data_enable=1

To really be useful you want as many gigabytes of swap space as you can
bear.  100G if you can.  Small amounts of swap space, like ~4GB isn't going
to do much to help cache a TB+ HDD.  40GB will help a little.  The more the
better.

-Matt

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 2:35 AM, PeerCorps Trust Fund <
ipc at peercorpstrust.org> wrote:
>
> Ha! Thanks for this. I actually set it up yesterday only to get a critical
> error notice that the external disk just couldn't keep up (my translation
> of the jargon it spit out). I had to stop the transfer and make a hard
> restart of the laptop.
>
> I am using a Thinkpad x200 and do intend on upgrading it via expresscard
> to USB 3.0. The external disk itself is USB 3.0 2 terabyte drive.
>
> FreeBSD was tested previously and works well. My draw to Dragonfly's is
> related to its NFS performance which seems to be consistently faster in my
> testing. I was also keen to experiment more with HAMMER outside of a
> virtual system. HAMMER's lower resource requirements are also a strong draw.
>
> On 12/17/2014 12:23 PM, Michael Neumann wrote:
> >
> >
> > Am 17.12.2014 um 03:52 schrieb Justin Sherrill:
> >> Short answer: yes, set up swapcache on the SSD and you'll benefit.
> >> That's the goal of swapcache.  See the swapcache man page for a guide
> >> on how large to make your partition, and use the rest for / or however
> >> you want to arrange it.
> >
> > But keep in mind swapcache does not work as a write-cache. It's only
> > caching reads.
> >
> > USB 2.0 sets a limit which is higher than the 20 MB/sec you get, so I
> > assume it's your disk that is not the fastest (which I guess is quite
> > common for "USB" disks). I doubt you get more out of that disk on any
> > other operating system.
> >
> > FreeBSD/ZFS has something called ZFS Intent Log, which does write
> > caching. But I doubt you want to use it on your laptop as in general ZFS
> > is a bit more hungry in terms of resources.
> >
> > I'd suggest you to buy a good/fast harddisk and attach it via eSATA or
> USB 3.0
> > (is it supported by DragonFly / your laptop?). Fast disks usually are
> powered
> > by an external power supply and not via the USB power (things might have
> > changed during the years). Swapcache can then help you to improve read
> > performance, which also helps write performance as it takes off read
> load from
> > the disk. A good harddisk should be able to give your 100 MB/sec of
> sequential
> > writes, but for random reads the performance is abysmal, this is where
> the SSD
> > shines.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >   Michael
>
>
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