We finally managed to get Intel X25-E SSD drive into our lab. I attached it to our Dell PowerEdge R900. The story making it running is worth separate mentioning – along with Intel X25-E I got HighPoint 2300 controller and CentOS 5.2 just could not start with two RAID controllers (Perc/6i and HighPoint 2300). The problem was solved by installing Ubuntu 8.10 which is currently running all this system. Originally I wanted to publish some nice benchmarks where InnoDB on SSD outperforms RAID 10, but recently I faced issue which can make previous results inconsistent.
In short words using Intel SSD X25-E card with enabled write-cache (which is default and most performance mode) does not warranty storing all InnoDB transactions on permanent storage.
I am having some déjà vu here, as Peter was rolling this 5 years ago http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/3/17/188 regarding regular IDE disks, and I did not expect this question poping up again.
Long story is:
I started with puting XFS on SSD and running very primitive test with INSERT INTO fs VALUES(0) into auto-increment field into InnoDB table. InnoDB parameters are
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<br>innodb_buffer_pool_size=3G<br>innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:10M:autoextend<br>innodb_file_per_table=1<br>innodb_log_buffer_size=8M<br>innodb_log_files_in_group=2<br>innodb_log_file_size=256M<br>innodb_thread_concurrency=0<br>innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1<br>innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT<br> |
Actually most interesting one are innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 and innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT (I tried also default innodb_flush_method, with the same result), using innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 I expect to have all committed transactions even in case of system failure.
Running this test with default XFS setting I saw SSD was doing 50 writes / s, this is something so forced me to check results several times – come on, it’s SSD, we should have much more IO there. Investigations put me into barries/nobarriers parameters and with mounting -o nobarrier I got 5300 writes / s. Nice difference, and this is something we want from SSD.
Now to test durability I do plug off power from SSD card and check how many transactions are really stored – and there is second bumper – I do not see several last N commited transactions.
So now time to turn off write-cache on SSD – all transactions are in place now, but write speed is only 1200 writes / s, which is comparable with RAID 10
So in conclusion to warranty Durability with SSD we have to disable write-cache which can affect performance results significantly (I have no results on hands, but it is to be tested).
What about LVM there ? Well, we often recommend to use LVM for backup purposes (even recent results are bad, we have no good replacement yet) and I tried LVM under XFS. With write-cache ON and default mount options (i.e. with barrier) I have 5250 writes / s, this is because LVM ignores write barriers (see http://dammit.lt/2008/11/03/xfs-write-barriers/ ), but again with enable write-cache you may lose transactions.
So in final conclusion:
1. Intel SSD X25E is NOT reliable in default mode
2. To have durability we need to disable write cache ( with following performance penalty, how much we need to test yet)
3. Possible solution could be put SSD into RAID controller with battery-backup-ed write cache, but I am not sure what is good ones – another are for research
4. XFS without LVM is putting barrier option which decreases write performance a lot
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