Bcache Testing: Metadata

“In the last two articles I’ve examined the performance of a new
kernel patch called bcache. This patch is designed to use SSD’s to
cache block devices (hard drives or RAID arrays) with the goal of
improving performance (and, really, who doesn’t like performance?).
In the first performance article it was found that there are some
workloads where bcache helped the throughput performance such as
record rewrite, random write (not a lot of improvement but it is
noticeable), and strided read (some improvement) compared to a
single disk.

“From the second article we also saw that there are some IOPS
workloads that can benefit from bcache. For example, sequential
write IOPS (in the case of 128KB records) and sequential read IOPS
(usually larger record sizes, particularly 128KB) both saw some
reasonable improvements from bcache. But we also saw that bcache
hurt random IOPS (both read and write).

“While you may be disappointed with the performance of bcache I
don’t think the performance is bad. Remember that the patch is
still very early in development so much of the tuning that takes
place in patches is still going on in earnest.”

Complete
Story