Dear Maged, Thanks a lot for detailed explanantion on dm-writecache with Ceph. You mentioned REQ_FUA support patch for dm-writecache, does such a patch not included into recent dm-writecache source code? I am using 4.4 and 4.15/4.19 kernels, where do i get the mentioned patch? best regards, Samuel huxiaoyu(a)horebdata.cn From: Maged Mokhtar Date: 2020-09-18 18:20 To: vitalif; huxiaoyu; ceph-users Subject: Re: [ceph-users] Re: Benchmark WAL/DB on SSD and HDD for RGW RBD CephFS dm-writecache works using a high and low watermarks, set at 45 and 50%. All writes land in cache, once cache fills to the high watermark backfilling to the slow device starts and stops when reaching the low watermark. Backfilling uses b-tree with LRU blocks and tries merge blocks to reduce hdd seeks, this is further helped by the io scheduler (cfq/deadline) ordering. Each sync write op to the device requires 2 sync write ops, one for data and one for metadata, metadata is always in ram so there is no additional metada read op (at the expense of using 2.5% of your cache partition size in ram). So for pure sync writes (those with REQ_FUA or REQ_FLUSH which is used by Ceph) get half the SSD iops performance at the device level. Now the questions, what sustained performance would you get during backfilling: it totally depends on whether your workload is sequential or random. For pure sequential workloads, all blocks are merged so there will not be a drop in input iops and backfilling occurs in small step like intervals, but for such workloads you could get good performance even without a cache. For purely random writes theoretically you should drop to the hdd random iops speed ( ie 80-150 iops ), but in our testing with fio pure random we would get 400-450 sustained iops, this is probably related to the non-random-ness of fio rather than any magic. For real life workloads that have a mix of both, this is where the real benefit of the cache will be felt, however it is not easy to simulate such workloads, fio does offer a zipf/theta random distribution control but it was difficult for us to simulate real life workloads with it, we did some manual workloads such as installing and copying multiple vms and we found the cache helped by 3-4 times the time to complete. dm-writecache does serve reads if in cache, however the OSD cache does help for reads as well as any client read-ahead and in general writes are the performance issue with hdd in Ceph. For bcache, the only configuration we did was to enable write back mode, we did not set the block size to 4k. If you want to try dm-writecache, use a recent 5.4+ kernel or a kernel with REQ_FUA support patch we did. You would need a recent lvm tools package to support dm-writecache. We also limit the number of backfill blocks inflight to 100k blocks ie 400 MB. /Maged On 18/09/2020 13:38, vitalif(a)yourcmc.ru wrote: