Mailing List Archive

NFS performance issue on Xen virtual machine
Hello everyone,

We are using NFS storage mount on our servers and we have noticed the difference with the write performance on different type of machines. Below you will find the results of writing 2000 1 KB test files:

The command we are using to write 1KB test files is the following:

time seq -w 1 2000 | xargs -n1 -I% sh -c 'sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=file.% bs=1KB count=1 oflag=dsync'

Result on a Xen virtual machine, which is slow:

real 1m10.691s
user 0m17.078s sys 0m46.313s

Result on a physical server, which is 3-4x faster:

real 0m17.284s
user 0m9.524s
sys 0m5.717s

We have also tried to tune some mount settings and no difference with the performance on the virtual machine:

1) The following is the mount option, as you can see "noatime" is set:

rw,noatime,vers=4.2,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=***REMOVED***,local_lock=none,addr=***REMOVED***

2) "async" is also enabled on the NFS exports.
Does anyone have an idea why and how we can improve the write performance? Thanks!