Q: Increasing samba lock performance in a ctdb 1.2 setup?

[Rainer Krienke]

Hello,

I am running a CTDB samba cluster with 4 nodes installed with SLES 11SP2
using samba 3.6.8 and ctdb version 1.2.52. The cluster nodes are virtual
machines running on a Citrix Xen Server 6.

The Cluster is basically working fine. What is causing me some headache
is however a problem that shows up when the total number of active samba
users rises to a value of about 300 (smbstatus -b|wc -l). Most of the
users access their windows profiles as well as a software share that
contains commonly used software like firefox that most user will start.

When there are many active windows users the effect is that starting
especially firefox (until the window shows up) takes up to 5 minutes
where usually it only takes about  20 seconds. This seems not to be due
to network congestion since there is not really much network traffic on
the samba nodes at this time  (say about 10MB/sec) on a 1 gigabit
network infrastructure. Copying files from another share via the same
CTDB cluster works really fast, big files with up to 90MByte/sec.  On
the samba cluster nodes I see that the ctdb process is eating up 40-60%
of CPU time on one CPU. Each node has a total of 6 CPUs to there is
enough CPU time for smb processes left that do not use more that 10%.
Each cluster node has 16GB of RAM at the moment.

Running smbstatus -L shows that there is a total of about 15000 locks in
the peak times and about 5000 that are related to firefox files.

stracing some smb-processes we found that there are many many byte range
locks executed on this software share. So what we did first was to set
"fake oplocks = Yes" for this software share. Globally in smb.conf we
configured:

        kernel oplocks = yes
        oplocks = yes
        posix locking = no

The fake oplocks for the software share helped already a lot making
firefox on windows start up faster (max about 1 minute) which is far
better that 5 minutes or more.

I now wonder what I could do else to increase performance for windows
locking which seems to be the bottle neck to me.  I found information
that suggests to use a ramdisk to store some ctdb databases that are now
stored in /var/lib/ctdb on a local (virtual) disk on each cluster node.

Can anyone tell me *which tdb files* exactly I should place on the
ramdisk? Is it ok to place a symlink in /var/lib/ctdb/<linkname> to the
file in the ramdisk or how else should I do this?

Any other ideas what I could do to find out more that might be related
to my problemsd are of course also welcome.

Thank you very much for any help in advance
Rainer Krienke
-- 
Rainer Krienke, Uni Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, A22, Universitaetsstrasse  1
56070 Koblenz, http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke, Tel: +49261287 1312
PGP: http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html,Fax: +49261287
1001312

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