Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] bacula-fd not playing nice with time critical apps

2009-02-16 03:05:31
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] bacula-fd not playing nice with time critical apps
From: Craig Ringer <craig AT postnewspapers.com DOT au>
To: Foo <bfoo33 AT yahoo.co DOT uk>
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:02:20 +0900
Foo wrote:

> Thanks, that helped, although there is still some packetloss (about a  
> quarter of the previous value).

Try setting the high priority job to -c1 (realtime) and the bacula fd to 
-c3 (idle) priority.

If that's still not sufficient, you may need to tune your disk subsystem 
for low latency instead of the usual high-throughput-and-high-latency 
configuration. Things that may help include:

- Reducing disk level, block device level, and filesystem-level 
readaheads (but not TOO much otherwise you'll waste so much time seeking 
that you'll be unable to service all the required I/O);

- Trying different I/O schedulers. cfq is the best for many, but not 
all, workloads.

- If you have a hardware RAID device:

   - If and only if it has a battery backed cache, enable write back
     caching mode

   - Tune (probably turn down) the hardware and/or driver I/O queue
     depth, so fewer requests are waiting outside the control of
     the Linux I/O priority queue system.

I landed up having to hack the sources of the driver for my 3Ware 
Escalade 8500-8 to get decent I/O latency, since the driver queued up to 
256 (!!) requests internally. This prevented Linux from pre-empting 
already issued I/O with higher priority new I/O requests.

--
Craig Ringer

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