Date:	Wed, 8 Jun 2011 18:59:47 +0300
From:	"Amir G." <amir73il@...rs.sourceforge.net>
To:	Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>
Cc:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, tytso@....edu,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, sandeen@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 00/30] Ext4 snapshots

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jun 2011, Amir G. wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, Amir G. wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com> wrote:
>> >> > Hi Amir,
>> >> >
>> >> > thanks very much for the resend. I'll take a look at the whole patch
>> >> > series, but first I want to bring up one important thing.
>> >> >
>> >> > While this being a huge feature for ext4 (regardless on how
>> >> > intrusive it is for the usual code paths) and while we already have
>> >> > patches in the list with people interesting in looking into them, you
>> >> > should clearly clarify what is the gain of it, what is the use case (and
>> >> > I know you have one), and why it is better than other approaches. You
>> >> > know, advertise it a bit in the marketing way :).
>> >>
>> >> Hi Lukas,
>> >>
>> >> Thank you for pointing out the marketing aspect.
>> >>
>> >> I must admit that my user-case rather speaks for itself.
>> >> CTERA develops a NAS device which is specialized for
>> >> backing up local networks and snapshots gives the NAS a time
>> >> dimension without paying for it in disk space and performance.
>> >>
>> >> The reason for not going with btrfs 3 years ago is clear.
>> >> So why not go with it now instead of moving forward to
>> >> ext4 with snapshots?
>> >> Part of the answer lies in the possibility to run fsck -x,
>> >> which gets rid of the snapshots in the case of fs corruption
>> >> and gets you back to good old stable and consistent ext4.
>> >
>> > But that is not even a real reason, is it ? When you need snapshots,
>> > well, then you just need it and do no want to get rid of it. When fs
>> > corruption appears, then it's bad in any case and the fsck should be
>> > able to more or less fix it.
>> >
>> > So you're saying that when corruption appears, then you *have to* blast
>> > all snapshots ? I am not sure how btrfs is going to deal with it, but it
>> > does seem like an advantage at all, why are you presenting it as such ?
>> >
>>
>> Hi Lukas,
>>
>> First of all, thank you for being strict with me.
>> I admit to having lousy marketing skills...
>>
>> The market I am targeting are the sys admins who
>> are very cautious about their 'data' and are reluctant
>> therefor to migrate from ext3 to ext4, not to speak of
>> btrfs.
>
> Well, that's why I am concerned with merging the ext4 snapshots. This is
> exactly the reason why people will get nervous when you try to push a
> huge change like ext4 snapshots into the stable code base. Yes, when you
> do not compile it in, it does not affect the fs very much, but try to
> tell people that ext4 is not the old-good-stable-ext4 when you enable
> this feature. And I do not believe that snapshot code does not interfere
> with the old ext4 code paths, so there is a place for horrible bugs
> waiting for us.
>
>>
>> To this market I say, you can have snapshots of your
>> 'data' on ext4 without risking the proven stability of ext4.
>> The snapshots of the 'data' are not guarantied to be as
>> stable (being a new feature), but because the snapshots
>> are second to 'data' in ext4 snapshots, corrupted snapshots
>> will not risk the 'data'.
>>
>> During 1 year of next3 in production systems, we found bugs.
>> But none of the bugs corrupted 'data'. All of the bugs which
>> caused file system to contain errors, the errors were restricted
>> to snapshot files and in those worst cases, we could always
>> go to emergency plan B (plan A being fsck -p) and run fsck -x
>> which always solved the problem.
>
> It does not matter that much how long or how much your embedded
> production systems are out there. The fact is that it is really very
> limited work load variation, hence very limited testing.

for the record, the embedded systems are x86_64 dual core,
but yes, it's true that the load variation is limited.
I am not saying there are no bugs, I'm just saying the 'fail safe'
always worked.


>
>>
>> The customer was always consulted before resorting to 'plan B'
>> and was given the chance to copy out 'data' from the snapshots
>> (it was always possible) before we discard them.
>
> So it is true, when you have an fs problem (corruption) you have to
> blast off all your snapshots ?

No, most of the time the problem could be solved by fsck -p
without discarding snapshots.
Only for the really hard cases, we had to discard the snapshots.

>
>>
>> Needless to say, the said bugs were fixed and ext4 snapshots
>> will enjoy the stability of next3 and the 'fail safe' nature of the
>> solution, which was proven several times on the field.
>>
>>
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > There is some confusion among developers on what actually are benefits
>> >> > of ext4 snapshots in comparison to btrfs, or in comparison to the new
>> >> > dm_multisnap code. I know that you have done quite a lot of testing to
>> >> > assure that it does not actually change old ext4 behavior when snapshot
>> >> > disabled, and that it works well when enabled, but have you done any
>> >> > performance related benchmarks ? Do you have any expectations on how it
>> >> > should behave in different work loads ?
>> >> >
>> >> > It would be great to see and be able to confirm that ext4 snapshots are
>> >> > really a win, not only on the feature side, but on the performance side
>> >> > as well. I know that there are people out there still undecided or
>> >> > having a strange feeling about your snapshot work. But who can blame
>> >> > them, when we have not seen any hard data on this matter ?
>> >>
>> >> Ehm.. I did present this benchmark on LSF:
>> >> http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=amir73il-4632-11284-26560
>> >>
>> >> unless you snoozed ;-)
>> >> it shows performance vs. ext4 w/o snapshots and with snapshots
>> >> and while taking snapshots.
>> >
>> > I believe that you just missed the fact that not everyone has attended LSF
>> > and your lightning talk, but that's ok.
>>
>> That's not really OK. I should have posted the results
>> and analysis on my wiki (the results are there).
>>
>> >
>> > It seems to me that random writes are usually faster with you snapshot
>> > code regardless whether you use snapshots or not. Is that because of
>> > non snapshot related changes you've made ?
>>
>> Not that I know of.
>> I can explain why random write onesnap is faster than nosnap
>> and why 1snappermin is faster than onesnap, but I am not
>> sure about nosnap vs. plain ext4.
>>
>> >
>> > Also random reads seems to be slower with snapshots, is suspect that
>> > this is because of read through, so the reason for the slowdown that it
>> > was CPU bound ? I do not see any CPU utilization data.
>> >
>>
>> Only the 1snappermin is slower.
>> I suspect it has to do with the fs freezes, but I admin I have not
>> looked into it.
>>
>> > The postmark results seems quite odd, it is actually a lot faster with
>> > one snapshot and a lot slower with multiple snapshots, do you have an
>> > idea what is going on ?
>> >
>>
>> The name onesnap is misleading. It should have been
>> existingsnaps.
>> The important factor is whether or not snapshots are taken during the test.
>> In the 1snappermin case, postmark is the only test that exposes the
>> weak spot of ext4 snapshots performance - deletes/truncates.
>> create file+delete file with existing snapshots has no overhead (no COW).
>> create file+take snapshot+delete file has the overhead of moving the
>> deleted blocks to snapshot.
>> With regards to speed up of onesnap, postmark is randomizing the file
>> creates/write so it may be a similar effect to random write.
>> I did not investigate this.
>>
>> >> I did not compare with btrfs, but I bet there are ext4 vs. btrfs
>> >> benchmarks out there.
>> >> dm-multisnap is better than dm-snap only when it comes to overhead
>> >> per snapshot. it still copies every written block, which is far from
>> >> being the case in ext4 snapshots.
>> >
>> > Nevertheless, I still have not seen any comparison with other
>> > snapshotting possibilities we have. Note that ext4 to btrfs comparison
>> > is not enough, because we do not know what is the difference between
>> > the difference of ext4 with/without snapshots and btrfs with/without
>> > snapshots. The reason for this is that btrfs performance is very likely
>> > to scale up, but ext4 is pretty much done in that matter and I do not
>> > expect any huge performance leaps in the future.
>> >
>> > Also, rejecting dm-multisnap based on this statement is not enough, show
>> > us some numbers.
>>
>> Well, if you come to understand the difference between fs level an dm
>> level snapshots, you will see why i am rejecting dm-multisnap
>> (performance wise only!).
>
> But I do understand the difference. And also, when it comes to fs level
> snapshotting I would suspect that it would do something we can not do
> with the current solutions, for example per-file or per-directory snapshots,
> cat ext4 snapshots do that ?

Nope.

>
>>
>> Anyway #1: I have already answered this questions 2 years ago and I
>> think the answers are still valid both for LVM and btrfs:
>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/next3/index.php?title=FAQ#Why_use_Next3_snapshots_and_not_LVM_snapshots.3F
>
> But again, it was two years ago and even back then you have not had any
> numbers proving your statements.
>
>>
>> Anyway #2: I need to give you some numbers ;-)
>
> That would be great. Thanks!
>
>>
>> >
>> > I believe that it is not very convenient for you, because this feature
>> > support your business case and you do not necessarily want to find out
>> > that there might be a better way, especially after the work you have
>> > done already.
>>
>> Your analysis of my motives is correct :-)
>> The use of the term 'better way' I reject.
>> I think that ext4/btrfs/LVM snapshots are apples and oranges and hamburgers.
>
> But they are really not, because otherwise it would complement each
> other, but they are all trying to do the same thing, except btrfs has
> it for free.

apples and oranges don't complement each other.
they are (non-equal) alternatives.

>
>> The question of whether the world needs ext4 snapshots is
>> perfectly valid, but going back to the food analogy, I think it's
>> a case of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".
>> I have no doubt that if ext4 snapshots are merged, many people will use it.
>
> Well, I would like to have your confidence. Why do you think so ? They
> will use it for what ? Doing backups ? We can do this easily with LVM
> without any risk of compromising existing filesystem at all. On desktop

LVM snapshots are not meant to be long lived snapshots.
As temporary snapshots they are fine, but with ext4 snapshots
you can easily retain monthly/weekly snapshots without the
need to allocate the space for it in advance and without the
'vanish' quality of LVM snapshots.

> ? I very much doubt that since you can not do per directory (or per
> file) snapshots, can you ?

No, I can't.

>
>> And I think that is a good enough (if not the best)
>> reason for inclusion.
>
> It would be of course, except you're the only one saying that.
>

I had several people approaching me that found the feature interesting
for their application. Some are developers I met on LSF, some are
users that found next3 interesting. One distro (OpenNode) has even
announced support for next3.

The incremental filesystem backup (ala ZFS send/recv) is a 'killer app'
in my opinion (and in the opinion of sys admins that use ZFS).
Ext4 snapshots enables that technology.

Amir.
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