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07-18-2012, 08:36 PM #1Web Hosting Guru
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What is my bottleneck for file hosting using this server? HDD or Port
Hello All,
We have a read intensive video hosting service for static files. I was wondering what is going to be my bottleneck for the following configurations
Intel Xeon E3-1230 Quad Core (Should be ok for some ffmpeg tasks)
8 GB DDR3 ECC 1333 Memory
1000 GB SATA Hard Drive (Not sure what RPM or Cache, waiting reply)
1Gbps Connectivity Port
My question is without any RAID setup (I know it is risky) will i be able to utilize the full 1Gbps if need be?
Some info:
- Only 20-30Mbps will be the upload into the server (writing)
- Assume full 1Gbps is available for upload + download
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07-18-2012, 08:41 PM #2Retired Moderator
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Disk first. A single Sata drive (or any for that matter) won't stand up to a read intensive service. You need Raid 10.
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07-18-2012, 09:25 PM #3WHT Addict
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Your disk will be your bottleneck. But according to "Only 20-30Mbps will be the upload into the server (writing)" your system will work fine.
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07-18-2012, 11:10 PM #4Web Hosting Guru
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Assuming standard RPM and cache for the HDD can you ballpark what is the maximum upload speed I can utilize on the port?
Basically I would like to calculate the number of viewers such server will be able to handle. Thanks in advance
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07-18-2012, 11:15 PM #5The Linux Specialist
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Hardware Raid10 is recommended when it comes to File or Video Hosting.
Specially 4 U
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07-18-2012, 11:18 PM #6Web Hosting Guru
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Not really worried about the data security since this is a free service.
my concern if I/O performance
Is a single 1TB SATA drive going to be outperformed by a 1Gbps upload port?
If so, roughly how much upload (viewers) can we do before I/O performance become and issue.
thanks
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07-18-2012, 11:28 PM #7Attack The Day
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07-18-2012, 11:47 PM #8Temporarily Suspended
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To cap out a 1gbps line, assuming its unmetered you are going to need a lot more throughput. Disks can only read so fast, however the more disks you have the more throughput and reads you can have. Sounds like you are on a budget, but if you want to make full use of that I would suggest 4-8 x 500gb drives in raid-10.
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07-18-2012, 11:54 PM #9Web Hosting Guru
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Thanks for the info. i have a taken atop output of my current server which has 4 HDD on a RAID0 configuration.
Whenever the servers running normal I do not see HDD on critical (red) but when I run encoding using ffmpeg all 4 drives become critical (busy ~80% to 90%)
According to atop currently server is uploading around 500Mbps and 60mbps downloading (users writing to disk)
Why is ffmpeg effecting the I/O performance? I thought it would effect the CPU performance more than I/O
atop: http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/9155/raid0l.png
If this is the case for 4 drives on RAID 0, would you say 1 drive don't stand a chance under similar load?
Thanks in advance for your help.
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07-19-2012, 12:02 AM #10Attack The Day
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The I/O performance of your drives are being effected when you encode a video because the video that is being encoded in stored on your hard drive. Your hard drive is being used to encode the video. Encoding a video is very resource intensive on the whole system (CPU, HDD, ect)
I would also assume that the video you are trying to encode isn't small.
A single drive would not be able to handle similar load.NewYorkCityServers.com - Specializing In Dedicated Servers and Financial Hosting
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07-19-2012, 12:28 AM #11Web Hosting Guru
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07-19-2012, 03:26 AM #12Web Hosting Guru
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I would encode the videos on another drive (or box) then use Nginx/Varnish to serve the static files.
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07-19-2012, 07:16 AM #13Junior Guru Wannabe
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RAID 10 + ZFS = Win!
or you can try to use and SSD to cache the files...
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07-19-2012, 08:12 AM #14Web Hosting Master
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"It depends"
As for those saying the 1 disk won't be enough to saturate the 1 Gbit line.. well that also depends on how much is cached in memory and how much will come from the disk for the current requests. (which depends on your site's usage)
If people tend to hit the same selection of files over and over and they fit in memory you'll most likely see very little IO. If the traffic is extremely random then all the requests will go to disk.
You'll also bottlneck sooner because you will be writing the converted files as well.
Raid 1/10 might be a good suggestion, or at the very least have several disks
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07-19-2012, 08:27 AM #15Hello World
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We see people attempting to use single disk setups for these type of sites time and time again I assume this is the case here again.
You need upgrade to a decent RAID-10 array sooner rather than later
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07-19-2012, 07:17 PM #16
Disk will be your bottleneck, although how much bandwidth you can use depends on a number of factors, most important being the size of the files you're serving. If you're serving large files (such as a video streaming site or large file host), if you bump up the linux disk readahead value to 512K (vs the default 128K), then you can get about 40MB/s from a single high quality sata drive serving files to a ton of people simultaneously, or around 300 megabit. If files are small (under 1MB for example), then the speeds will drop. The fewer total files you have, the more likely they will be in your disk cache in ram, which boosts throughput, and the more files you have, the less likely any given request will be cached in ram already, lowering throughput.
I would recommend at minimum a 2 drive software raid 1, as this will double your read speeds, and you can still benefit from increasing the linux readahead to 512k. With raid 10, sometimes the performance will be no better than raid 1, particularly for mostly-read workloads for large files, because the stripe size is normally far too small to be optimal. However, if you do set a 2MB or larger raid stripe along with a 512K readahead, then a 4 drive raid 10 should be nearly twice as fast as a 2 drive raid 1.
Regardless of the specifics, it's unlikely you'll saturate a 1gbps port using a single sata drive unless the total files you're storing are small enough that they all fit in ram. Under perfect conditions, you could get close to 1gbps with 2 drives in raid 1.IOFLOOD.com -- We Love Servers
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07-19-2012, 07:21 PM #17
Ironically, for serving large files with many simultaneous users, a 4 drive raid 0 is not necessarily a lot faster than a single drive alone, because the raid striping can cause a single disk read of 1MB for example, read from all 4 disks. since disks are limited in how many operations per second much moreso than they are in MB/s, having a single disk read span all 4 disks will kill your performance. If you set the stripe size large enough (I recommend a 2MB stripe and 512k linux readahead for serving large files), then a 4 drive raid 0 will perform nearly 4 times as fast as a single drive alone, but with the default stripe size of 256k and default readahead of 128k, the performance of the 4 drive raid 0 will be something crazy like 1/6th of what it could be with a 2MB stripe and 512k readahead.
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07-21-2012, 12:12 AM #18Web Hosting Guru
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07-21-2012, 08:40 AM #19Junior Guru Wannabe
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to get your current readahead value:
blockdev --getra /dev/sda
to tweak readahaed value:
sudo blockdev --setra 16384 /dev/sda
change 16384 to any value (256, 512, ...,4096, 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144).
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07-21-2012, 03:30 PM #20IOFLOOD.com -- We Love Servers
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07-24-2012, 08:27 PM #21Web Hosting Guru
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Hello All,
I have the option to buy a second server with the following specs
XEON E5 2603
64GB RAM
2x3TB HDD 7200
1Gbps dedicated port with 100TB transfer
They also have 2 port 3ware RAID controller. Should I go with a Hardware RAID or software for read intensive operation?
Can some one explain what is the difference between 2 and 4 port RAID controllers?
Thanks in advance
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07-24-2012, 08:43 PM #22Web Hosting Master
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With the much larger amount of RAM, you can reduce the amount of disk I/O you'll need substantially.
1) You can create a RAM disk, and encode your video onto that first, and then just copy the completed movie to your hard drives afterwards.
2) You'll be able to cache a lot of your movies in a RAM.
Depending on the RAID card, there may be different types of ports. Either they are SATA/SAS ports, where you can only use 1 drive per port, or you can have SFF8087 ports where you can connect a 1-to-4 fan-out cable and have 4x drives per port. You'll need to clarify with the provider on which of these it is.
Assuming you're running Linux, don't bother with hardware RAID for RAID 0, 1, 10 as the RAID operations are too simple to warrant offloading to a separate card. Hardware RAID on Linux only really makes sense for RAID 5, 6, 50, 60 or other raid types where parity calculations need to be made.ASTUTE INTERNET: Advanced, customized, and scalable solutions with AS54527 Premium Performance and Canadian Optimized Network (Level3, Shaw, CogecoPeer1, GTT/Tinet),
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07-24-2012, 08:48 PM #23Web Hosting Guru
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thanks a lot for that information.
Do you know if I need to setup ffmpeg differently in order to take advantage of this RAM?
Basically from what I hear on this thread I have to make sure ffmpeg and nginx(which we use to deliver video) take advantage of this RAM. Does it make sense to hire someone that knows I/O to optimize this server?
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07-24-2012, 08:52 PM #24Web Hosting Master
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You just need to create a RAM disk, which will just reserve the specified amount of RAM and it will logically behave just like a hard drive. You then just have to choose it as the disk location to encode the movie to.
The Linux kernel will automatically cache popular files from disk into memory, so you don't have to do anything with Nginx. You will have more control on how things get cached if you setup Nginx to do caching though, which might help.ASTUTE INTERNET: Advanced, customized, and scalable solutions with AS54527 Premium Performance and Canadian Optimized Network (Level3, Shaw, CogecoPeer1, GTT/Tinet),
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07-24-2012, 10:12 PM #25
Maybe, but there really isn't a whole lot to it:
1) If using software raid 10, make sure the raid stripe is 2MB
2) If using hardware raid 10, make sure the raid stripe is as large as the raid controller will allow
3) Set the linux readahead to 1/4 of the raid stripe (if using raid 10), or to 512k (if using raid 1 or no raid at all)
4) Disable "atimes" in /etc/fstab
5) All else being equal, more ram, more hard drives, or faster rpm drives, are better than less ram, fewer hard drives, or slower rpm drivesIOFLOOD.com -- We Love Servers
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