[Ocfs2-users] Support and Stability

[Brian Kroth]

Michael Austin <onedbguru at gmail.com> 2010-05-24 13:32:
>    I would like to get some feedback on the overall perception on the support
>    and stability of OCFS2 (latest).  This tool looks like a perfect fit for
>    a production system I am planning, but, due to it's open source roots,
>    there are some concerns about s&s.  The app will be deemed mission
>    critical with very little tolerance for any downtime (24x365). 
> 
>    Thanks.
> 
>    M. Austin
>    Consultant

It pains me to, but I can't say I'd recommend it for something like a
mail setup that has heavy write of tiny files.  There's a fragmentation
issue that burned us bad recently and before that a locking issue
(search the archives).  Even then I have to say that the Oracle devs
were responsive to us even without a service contract, for which I'm
very grateful.  You might have better luck with a "supported" distro.
I've always used mainline kernels with Debian.

That said, I had been using an earlier version for a web server backend
(couple of TB, mostly read) and a video streaming library (_many_ TB and
_lots_ of read traffic) for a long time without any reports of problems.
I don't work there anymore, but from what I hear everything's still
humming along without interruption (that should be read overall cluster
interruption) for almost 3 years now.  That even with crummy server rooms
that try bake their inhabitants from time to time :)

I will also say just off hand that OCFS2 is still the best OSS shared
disk cluster fs I've tried.  I've tested GFS2 off and on for a couple of
years and it still has a rather trivial deadlock case:

# cssh node1 node2 node3
# mkdir /cluster/$HOSTNAME
# touch /cluster/$HOSTNAME/test
# rm -rf /cluster/*

Cheers,
Brian
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