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Mon, 14 Apr 2008

Initial network filesystem benchmark. POHMELFS vs NFS. Round 1.

Hardware (both client and server have the same hardware).
4-way (2 logical (HT) + 2 physical cpus) 3.00 Xeon (32 bits with PAE :), 8 GB of RAM, Intel 82541GI gbit adapters, Seagate ST3300007LC 10k rpm scsi disk on Adaptec AIC7902 PCI-X Ultra320 SCSI adapter.

Software.
Server: 2.6.25-rc7 kernel, in-kernel NFS server, userspace POHMELFS server.
Client: 2.6.25-rc8 kernel, in-kernel clients.
Both have all kernel debugging turned on.

Round 1. Huge directory (linux-2.6.24.4.tar archive) untarring over the network.
Picture shows it all.



Notice, that there is no test for POHMELFS reading (that is why it is only first round), since it is miserable. And I know the reason: I'm lazy, so I use generic reading function (generic_file_aio_read()), but actually Linux does not have AIO reading from usual files, so it is very synchronous and requires to read data page-by-page, so we have a pretty broken system in regards to network performance.

Since reading is not async, so I will reimplement generic_file_aio_read() as pohmelfs_aio_read(), which will be a real AIO reading function. That will be second round, where POHMELFS will win.

But it can not win the game. Because things are changing. Today I've known, that if filesystem has only 20 users over the world, then it should not be merged, since burden of changing something generic in VFS (and thus propagate it to filesystems) is too high.

What has happend? Linux kernel maintainers started to be afraid of changes? Afraid of more code? Afraid of something new they do not want?..

Eh, and they tell they want more developers... They want monkeys who will do only what was asked them to do.

POHMELFS will be sent for review of course, but it is highly unlikely I will push it upstream.

/devel/fs :: Link / Comments (6)

A hypocrisy.

When user fills the bug, developer is supposed to fix it. That is obvious and of course true.

But interesting things start showing in details.
If user piss developer off, it is ok. If developer throws something back - it is bad.
If user does not answer, it is ok. If developer keeps silence - he is a bastard.
If user fills bug, it is ok. If developer asks user for some help - developer is a fucking monster.

Yes, there are real jerks in development community as long as in users, and getting simple numbers: user community is much bigger than development one, so number of crappy people scales as well. And nevertheless, people like to blame developers and pray to users. This comes down to absurd, when developer asks for help, and then he is blamed for not devoting time to solving a problem.

People like to look at others. I like to look at others too of course. And we frequently like to forget that we behave exactly like those who we blame to be jerks. Exactly like them. We just forgot that, or do not pay attention, or do not want to think about, since when things come to us, this becomes a hypocrisy.

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (1)