MooseFS taking shape

I am continuing experimenting with MooseFS. However, the final configuration looks somewhat different from what I had originally envisioned. For one thing, the idea of placing the master and metadata servers in VirtualBox VM's didn't quite work out. I guess that created just too many levels of execution and as a result that lead to the overall load growing too much and the performance suffering as soon as any serious load was applied.

So I switched to simply running all the processes (master, meta, chunkserver) on the same hardware and got rid of all the VM's. That worked fine. I defined a separate network - currently fully confined to the same host - in order to host the MooseFS installation. And MooseFS clients have started to run just fine. I got a performance of up to 80 MB/s for reading data from the MooseFS over a 1 Gbit/s network.

However, one problem remained. Running UNFSD on the same machine I got very poor performance.  As few as 5 clients could drive it down to just 30 KB/s! And that on an 8-core 48 GB RAM machine - while a MooseFS client would read at 3 orders of magnitude as much!

Surprisingly, the fix was simple: if I ran UNFSD on a separate physical machine the performance went back into the tens of MB/s range. So that was what I settled for. That NFS server machine is currently just a CentOS Linus MooseFS client sitting on the "general" network - different from the one hosting MooseFS - and sporting a mere 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM. So I guess for now I have a working solution.