Can the underlying local file system affect PVFS performance?
Yes! However, the interaction between the PVFS servers and the local file system hosting the storage space has not been fully explored. No doubt a great deal of time could be spent on different file systems and their parameters. People have looked at sync performance for a variety of file systems. Some file systems will flush all dirty buffers when fsync is called. Other file systems will only flush dirty buffers belonging to the file. See the threads starting at http://www.parl.clemson.edu/pipermail/pvfs2-developers/2004-July/000740.htmland at http://www.parl.clemson.edu/pipermail/pvfs2-developers/2004-July/000741.html. These tests demonstrate wide variance in file system behavior. Interested users are encouraged to experiment and discuss their findings on the PVFS lists. If you’re looking for a quick suggestion for a local file system type to use, we suggest ext3 with “journal data writeback” option as a reasonable choice.
