Performance Tuning

Portworx has best practices for both global container level optimization, as well as volume granular optimization.

Global performance tuning

As of Portworx version 1.3, it is recommended to use a journal device to absorb Portworx metadata writes. Journal writes are small with frequent syncs and therefore only SSD/NVME should be configured as a journal device.

In 1.x, the journal device should be 2GB, and in 2.x it should be 3GB. Using a larger device will not help, since Portworx will only use these amounts of storage. The journal device can be specified via the -j option during installation, documented here.

If you are upgrading to 1.3 and want to add a journal device to an existing node, follow these instructions.

Volume granular performance tuning

Portworx optimizes performance for specific application access patterns. These can be set by specifying an io_profile while creating the volume. For example:

pxctl volume create --size=10 --repl=3 --io_profile=sequential demovolume

or

docker volume create -d pxd io_priority=high,size=10G,repl=3,io_profile=random,name=demovolume

The sequential profile

This optimizes the read ahead algorithm for sequential access. Use io_profile=sequential.

The random profile

This records the IO pattern of recent access and optimizes the read ahead and data layout algorithms for short term random patterns. Use io_profile=random.

CMS

This is useful for content management systems, like WordPress. This option applies to a Portworx shared (global namespace) volume. It implements an attribute cache and supports async writes. This increases the Portworx memory footprint by 100MB. Use io_profile=cms.

The db_remote profile

This implements a write-back flush coalescing algorithm. This algorithm attempts to coalesce multiple syncs that occur within a 50ms window into a single sync. Coalesced syncs are acknowledged only after copying to all replicas. In order to do this, the algorithm requires a minimum replication (HA factor) of 3. This mode assumes all replicas do not fail (kernel panic or power loss) simultaneously in a 50 ms window. Use io_profile=db_remote.

The sync_shared profile

Use this profile to set up the mount settings of your sharedV4 volumes. This profile sets the following options:

• sync

  This option synchronizes all the write operations with your backend storage. If you specify this option, the server and the clients will be able to access modified data immediately.

• noac

  This option disables the caching for the file system and metadata (file and directory attributes) on the client-side.