[Beowulf] zfs tuning for HJPC/cluster workloads?

[Joe Landman]

Hi folks:

   Investigating zfs on a Solaris 10 5/08 loaded JackRabbit for a 
customer.  zfs performance isn't that good relative to Linux on this 
same hardware (literally a reboot between the two environments)

   I am looking for ways to tune zfs, or even Solaris so we can 
hopefully get to parity with Linux (less than 50% of Linux performance 
now c.f. http://scalability.org/?p=640 ).  What I have found online has been
	http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide

   and a number of others.  Even the dangerous tuning methods mentioned 
in this document (turning off Zil), don't really help all that much.

   This is for an IO intensive application with multiple threads doing 
1-100 GB streaming reads.

   Offline from others I have heard similar issues, so if someone knows 
how to tweak the OS or FS to get good performance, please fire me over a 
pointer ... I would appreciate it !

   Thanks.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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