Mogile Deployment Layout: More Hosts or More Disks.

Javier Frias jfrias at gmail.com
Tue Sep 18 17:24:46 UTC 2007


On 9/18/07, dormando <dormando at rydia.net> wrote:
> Hmm :) Maybe my next documentation spree should be a mogilefs FAQ :)
>

Yeap, that would be awesome :)

> > Main question is, do we do more hosts per disks, or more disks per hosts.
>
> I think the tradeoff here is pretty easy to spot:
>
> As you spread out hosts:
>
> - More local cache. mogstored relies on an OS's object cache to speed up
> hot files, which you mention the CDN should take care of that...
> - More bandwidth to the devices.
> - Lessens the impact of losing a host (you should have enough mogilefs
> hosts/devices that losing any one or two is something you don't have to
> care about!).
> - More CPU, I guess. It's rare but possible to load up mogstored on CPU.
>
> As you add more devices:
>
> - Fewer hosts to manage
> - Losing an individual disk in a machine shouldn't hurt anything. In my
> own setup I never bothered replacing dead disks in a host with multiple
> drives. Just marked them as dead and got more hd's on the next server order.
> Since you're somewhat more likely to lose a device than a whole host,
> this isn't so bad.
>

Agreed.

> You have to keep in mind:
>
> - How full are your devices actually going to get before they become too
> active to hold more files? 750G drives are nice, but usually I can't
> even fill a 250G drive before it gets hosed with IO.
> - The impact of losing a whole host with many 750G drives with many
> (millions of?) files. It could take a long time for the reaper and
> replicators to deal with this as they work in small batches of files.
> Then again, it won't matter as much as you grow (and especially if you
> can quickly deal with dead hosts).
>
> So on a really busy service, I'd have tons of 64-bit hosts with extra
> RAM. On something with more streaming involved, you have to understand
> your dataset well to understand which way to go. Think about the average
> size/access type of your files, as well as how often they're added or
> replaced in the system.
>
> Just remember to think of spindles more than disk size. Unless your
> dataset is very idle you won't end up filling the disk, and the more
> devices you have the more you can parallelize your batch operations :)
>

And this is where the issue comes. Right now, the usage patterns of
our system will change. We envision this as i said as more of an
archival system with light file serving, although this may well
change.

Our growth in images is about 7GB/day with text, uncompressed, being
around 1-2GB. But we do expect this to double every 3-6 months.

This of course in addition to our main data load, which will be about
3TB of images, and less than a TB of text ( since MogileFS will be
doing compression)

> > As a side note, any real reason not to run the trackers on the storage
> > nodes?
>
> I did it. Worked okay. Most of my storage nodes didn't have trackers,
> but some did. The only issue is the trackers can get CPU heavy, which
> could interact with other things on your box.
>

Figured that was one of the ways to alleviate this(cpu), by spreading
them across, and running as many as possible.

> > also, anyone have any pros cons on running mysql master/save
> > with InnoDB on DRBD versus running lets say mysql cluster?
> >
>
> MySQL Cluster's probably not the greatest fit for the mogilefs database.
> The dataset can be relatively small, but I don't think it's quite small
> enough. Although honestly I only say that because I have limited
> experience with cluster. My mogilefs DBs have been happy if they have
> enough RAM for InnoDB to properly cache things...
>
> DRBD should work okay. I've also done master:master with
> auto_increment_offset, but that might scare the bejesus out of some
> folks on the list. I like being able to optimize my tables though :)
>

The master-master solution sounds actually pretty interesting, and its
something i'd probably want to implement if it works well enough.
Would there be huge contention issues? do you just create a vip and
round robing between the masters?


> -Dormando
>


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