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.

You must ensure that the journal device is faster than your storage device allocated for Portworx. If the journal device is slower than the actual storage drive, your overall performance will be lower and match the lower of two devices.

Cloud providers match the drive’s performance based on it’s size. So if you select a small sized journal device, your performance will be worse. For a cloud drive, provide a partition from the larger storage drive as your journal device.

As of Portworx 1.4, Portworx, Inc. recommends using the -j auto option. This allows Portworx to create its own journal partition on the best drive.

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

Tune volume performance with pxctl

Portworx optimizes performance for specific application access patterns using IO profiles. You can set these IO profiles by providing the io_profile option while creating the volume. For example:

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

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

For more information about IO profiles, see the IO profiles section of the documentation.

FIO Performance