Josef,

If you want to figure out if you are suffering from overhead from a lack
of contagious freespace, you can compute it from statit with the following
formula:

(CP Reads * chain)  / (writes * chain) = CPRead Ratio.  This can be done
on any data disk in a raid group.

this will give you a value expressing the amount of correct parity(CP
Read) workload vs write workload.  below .5 is very efficientŠ .51 - .75
is usually not noticeable, but may need some attentionŠ  .75 - 1 is bad,
and more than 1 is _very_ badŠ  Generally, the closer the ratio gets to
1:1 the less efficient the controller is, because it¹s having to do so
much CP Read IO for a given write stripe.

The ratio has been steadily climbing since januaryŠ (see default.png
attachment for chart). Is there a new type of workload on the system that
is either quickly filling the aggr, or has a _lot_ of add and delete
characteristics to it (creating lots of holes in the stripes), but even
so, I¹d be surprised to see it affecting write latency on it¹s own this
early in the game. it¹s usually got to be a bit higher before anyone
notices, but there is no denying, there does seem to be some correlation
with the latency increases on your VM Volumes as the ratio gets worseŠ

you will want your aggr option for free_space_realloc=on, I think, if you
want to ensure that free space stays happy for the future.  TR-3929
ŒReallocate Best Practices Guide¹ has all the gory details.



you may also want to take a peak at nfs-stat -d on your controllerŠ there
are some indications of VMDK files that may not be aligned properly, and
checking the last couple of months, there were a few spots where the
controller ran out of partial write handling resourcesŠ probably not the
overall issue, but Œone more thing¹ to be concerned with.


Paul Flores
Professional Services Consultant 3
Americas Performance Assessments Team
NetApp
281-857-6981 Direct Phone
713-446-5219 Mobile Phone
paul.flores@netapp.com

http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/professional/assessment.html






On 3/25/16, 3:29 PM, "toasters-bounces@teaparty.net on behalf of josef
radinger" <toasters-bounces@teaparty.net on behalf of
cheese@nosuchhost.net> wrote:

>cpu on netapp is higher than it used to be. i think we see higher cpu
>than normal since around 1 month. we used to be at 30-40% and now we
>are slightly higher during work-hours at 50-60% with some peaks to
>around 90%. i'm currently not in my office and have no access to exact
>statistics.
>
>On Fri, 2016-03-25 at 19:41 +0000, Jeffrey Mohler wrote:
>> They should be 100% on an empty aggregate..but still, spindles seem
>> to handle the workload just fine.
>>
>> What the history of CPU on the system..when did it work well last,
>> what was CPU load then?
>> 
>> _________________________________
>> Jeff Mohler
>> Tech Yahoo, Storage Architect, Principal
>> (831)454-6712
>> YPAC Gold Member
>> Twitter: @PrincipalYahoo
>> CorpIM:  Hipchat & Iris
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, March 25, 2016 12:28 PM, josef radinger <cheese@nosuchhost
>> .net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> performance advisor shows the following:
>> read latency on a vmware-datastore at around 5-20ms.
>> write latency at around 10-15ms with peaks:
>> "other" latency at up to 500ms, i'm quite sure this other is my
>> problem.
>>
>> but what me bothers is the stripe ratio:
>>    2428.65 partial stripes                  85.83 full stripes
>> my knowledge is that i should have a lot more full stripes than
>> partial ones.
>>
>> images are at
>> http://www.nosuchhost.net/~cheese/temp/readandwrite.png
>> http://www.nosuchhost.net/~cheese/temp/other.png
>>
>> my colleagues had troubles while patching several windows-systems
>> residing in that datastore, as the systems got unresponsive and
>> access got very slow.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 2016-03-25 at 18:42 +0000, Jeffrey Mohler wrote:
>> > Are you write latency troubled, or read latency troubled?
>> >
>> > I don't see free space frag as a huge issue, as lightly loaded as
>> > the spindles report to be.
>> >
>> >
>> > 
>> > _________________________________
>> > Jeff Mohler
>> > Tech Yahoo, Storage Architect, Principal
>> > (831)454-6712
>> > YPAC Gold Member
>> > Twitter: @PrincipalYahoo
>> > CorpIM:  Hipchat & Iris
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Friday, March 25, 2016 11:37 AM, josef radinger <cheese@nosuchho
>> > st.net> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > hi
>> >
>> > i have a metro cluster (rather old) which is currently responding
>> > very
>> > slowly. 7-mode 8.1.4
>> >
>> > there is only one aggregate per head, filled at around 72% one one
>> > head
>> > and 79% on the other head. attached is a statit and sysstat -x 1
>> > from one head.
>> >
>> > i see lots of partial stripes and only several full stripes. i
>> > assume
>> > this should mean not enough free space, which should imho not be a
>> > problem at my aggregates.
>> >
>> > what is the correct procedure for performing a free space
>> > reallocation?
>> > i did:
>> > * stop all volume-reallocates
>> > * disable read_reallocation on all volumes
>> > * raid.lost_write.enable      off
>> > * aggr options aggr0 resyncsnaptime 5
>> > * reallocate start -A -o aggr0
>> > * wait for finish of reallocate
>> > * aggr options aggr0 resyncsnaptime 60
>> > * enable read_reallocation on all volumes
>> > * reenable all volume-level reallocates
>> >
>> > my aggregates have options:
>> >
>> > aggr options aggr0
>> > root, diskroot, nosnap=off, raidtype=raid_dp, raidsize=20,
>> > ignore_inconsistent=off, snapmirrored=off, resyncsnaptime=60,
>> > fs_size_fixed=off, snapshot_autodelete=on, lost_write_protect=on,
>> > ha_policy=cfo, hybrid_enabled=off, percent_snapshot_space=5%,
>> > free_space_realloc=off
>> >
>> >
>> > any advice?
>> > josef
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Toasters mailing list
>> > Toasters@teaparty.net
>> > http://www.teaparty.net/mailman/listinfo/toasters