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Gluster Experience (part one)

Recently we started to dabble with clustering file systems, in particular a rather new and promising one called gluster

So far, even if people suggests to use the upcoming 2.0 version we found already some annoying glitches in the 2.0.0rc1, namely the writebehind capability wasn’t working at all, reducing the writing speed to 3Mb/s (on a gigabit link to a cluster of 3 nodes each one with a theoretical peak speed of 180Mb/s), luckily they fixed it in their git, sadly the peak speed for a single node is about 45Mb/s per single transfer and around 75Mb/s when aggregating 5 concurrent transfers, nfs on the same node reaches 95Mb/s on single transfer.

Since looks like there is lots of time wasted waiting somehow (as the experiment with concurrent transfer hints) we’ll probably investigate more and obviously look for advices.

The current setup uses iocache+writebehind as performance translators and maps the nodes as 6 bricks (2 bricks exported per node), replicating 3 times (one for each node) and using dht to join the 2 replicating groups.

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PyHP-SVN got a new parser

PyHP got a new parser on subversion repository (click here to download), the new parser is still experimental and needs a lot of testing, but it has some interesting new features:

  • Parsing errors reporting
  • Block based indentation
  • Faster parsing and inclusion

First of all, now parsing errors like unmatching tags are reported on pyhp log. It will be reported the line and the file for which the error has happened (also if the file has been included).

Next now you can indent your code as you wish inside your <?pyhp?> code blocks. PyHP will reformat the indentation based on the first line indentation. You will just have to indent your code in the same way inside the <?pyhp?> block, but the blocks can be indented as html tags now.

The new parsers is written with ragel state machines generator and it performs faster then the old one.

As the new parser might have bugs you can still compile enabling the old parser by passing –enable-newparser=no to the configure script.