<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1528" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <DIV align=left><FONT face=Courier color=#008000 size=2>Classification: UNCLASSIFIED</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>just idly wondering what the IO would be if NFS exporting the ext3 or gfs to the other node and running iozone on 2 such clients. There was no file contention was there? By that I mean each instance of iozone was writing to a different directory (both on GFS) so file-level read/write locking wasn't a factor. Presumably GFS locking is all about keeping the filesystem meta-data intact. BTW, has anyone applied the idea behind SoftUpdates to GFS? Say part of the heartbeat is a broadcast of the meta-data changes so while data blocks might by written syncronously, not every meta-change has to wait for the FC/array to commit it to disk before continuing? I'm thinking of what we did for firewall-farm syncronization which was 1xActive/NxPassive and they all could handle each other's network traffic at any time should the current master drop off with the only streams affected being those initiated since the last status update message was sent out to the passive nodes.</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>Would it work such that the nodes vote on a meta-master and all meta-data is kept in memory and then periodically flushed? Because if each meta-change is broadcast and each node spools it to local storage, then when it's time to elect a new master the nodes can consult their transaction histories. Is there a good paper that describes the detailed inner-workings of GFS aside from having to read all the code? So far I've found this: <A href="https://open.datacore.ch/DCwiki.open/Wiki.jsp?page=GFS">https://open.datacore.ch/DCwiki.open/Wiki.jsp?page=GFS</A></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>