Re: Idea for reducing disk IO on tagging operations

[Todd Denniston]

"Mark D. Baushke" wrote:
> 
<SNIP>
> Dr. David Alan Gilbert <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > > FWIW: (In my personal experience) using a SAN
> > > solution for your repository storage allows you
> > > much better throughput for all write operations in
> > > the general case as the SAN can guarentee the
> > > writes are okay before the disk actually does it.
> >
> > But when you throw a GB of writes at them in a short time from a tag
> > accross our whole repository they aren't going to be happy - they are
> > going to want to get rid of that backlog of write data ASAP.
> 
> I believe you will find that the performance knee for a commercial SAN
> that is well provisioned happens when you hit a 2GB of sustained writes.
> You are more likely to run into problems with bandwidth to the
> fiberchannel mesh first.
> 
> For us, I seem to recall that the actual bottleneck is the creation of
> the /tmp/cvs-server$$ trees for a 'cvs tag' operation. So, you results
> will also depend on how shallow or deep your module hierarchy runs.
> 
<SNIP>

This reminds me of conversations held earlier in the list.  I think several
of them ended with something to the effect of 'putting the /tmp/ or LockDir
which cvs uses on a RAM disk should make the whole thing _much_ faster'.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2002-05/msg00103.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2001-01/msg00553.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2003-10/msg00263.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2003-10/msg00264.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2003-10/msg00268.html
a note with some comparison of speed using memory backed filesystem:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2001-01/msg00567.html

Greg once indicated that if you have a bunch of tags which are meaningful
for only a short time it MIGHT save some processing to clean them up some,
but I don't think it really affects the situation posed by the Dr.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2003-03/msg00331.html
-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane) 
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter