[lug] NVMe Storage on older systems

[Bear Giles]

My main setup is similar. I originally lived entirely on the NVMe drive but
after the problems I mentioned earlier I reinstalled the OS so it boots off
my SSD but /home is on the NVMe. That's because of java - the standard
classloader has an open file handle pointing to each entry in the 'jar'
(zip) files. I've worked on projects where there were 10k+ open file
handles. If you're a dev you want those files on the fastest media. (It's
less important on servers since they'll only need to be loaded once.)

The VMs are on the SSD. They still load quickly but I'm not reloading them
every 10 minutes.

I'm not sure where docker images lives but the startup time is so long it's
probably not worth the effort of putting them on the NVMe drive.

(I'm starting to use a java library that can manage docker images so you
can use them as test servers. Not a big deal if you only need one or two
test servers but we need to test against a wide variety of server
configurations - too many to realistically maintain as real or traditional
virtual servers. Maintaining a docker image is much more manageable.
Unfortunately there's nearly always a 60s delay to allow time for the
server to come up. We need to look into modifying our tests so they can run
in parallel.)

On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:59 PM, Maxwell Spangler <
lists at maxwellspangler.com> wrote:

> Just reporting a very satisfying success
>
> I bought one of these PCIe to NVMe boards: Startech NVMe + two M.2 SATA
> slots
>
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IR05DLK/ref=oh_aui_
> detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
>
> and put it in an eight year old workstation with a PCIe 2.0 bus and it
> worked very nicely with Linux.
>
> My read benchmarks on a Samsung 512G 970 PRO NVMe drive are showing 1,800
> MB/s. Writes are around 500MB/s which should be faster, but I haven't
> investigated that much yet.
>
> This NVMe card regularly benchmarks at much faster rates, but that's
> always in modern motherboards with CPU to NVMe direct PCIe connections or
> PCIE 3.0 bus systems.
>
> With PCIe 2.0 at 500 MB/s x 4 lanes my max bandwidth is 2,000 MB/s, so
> 1,800 MBs is really nice.
>
> I'm just thrilled that Linux saw it with no special drivers or
> configuration required and that it works so well.
>
> It's part of a home lab VM system that'll also have a Samsung 950 PRO SATA
> SSD. I'm planning on using a HDD to boot the OS, basic VM storage on the
> SATA drive and some high performance VM data storage on the NVMe drive.
>
> M
>
> --
>
> Maxwell Spangler
> ===================================================================
> Denver, Colorado, USA
> maxwellspangler.com <http://www.maxwellspangler.com>
>
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