ZFS - zpool ARC cache plus L2ARC benchmarking
- by jemmille
I have been doing lots of I/O testing on a ZFS system I will eventually use to serve virtual machines. I thought I would try adding SSD's for use as cache to see how much faster I can get the read speed. I also have 24GB of RAM in the machine that acts as ARC. vol0 is 6.4TB and the cache disks are 60GB SSD's. The zvol is as follows:
pool: vol0
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
vol0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
cache
c3t5001517958D80533d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t5001517959092566d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
The issue is I'm not seeing any difference with the SSD's installed. I've tried bonnie++ benchmarks and some simple dd commands to write a file then read the file. I have run benchmarks before and after adding the SSD's.
I've ensured the file sizes are at least double my RAM so there is no way it can all get cached locally.
Am I missing something here? When am I going to see benefits of having all that cache? Am I simply not under these circumstances? Are the benchmark programs not good for testing the effect of cache because of the the way (and what) it writes and reads?
