Tag: aws

After running into an issue when copying thousands of files at one to EFS, I came across https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/efs-troubleshoot-slow-performance/

Let’s look at some benchmarks – the issue was that this job was taking 30+ seconds which would have timed out the HTTP server and it’s not yet a background job. It unzips a file to a temporary directory (not in EFS), does some validation, then copies the contents to EFS. The zip in question was 3000 files, around ~150MB extracted.

# find /big_dir | wc -l
3098
# time cp -R /big_dir /efs_dir

real    0m37.957s
user    0m0.052s
sys     0m0.960s

Ouch, that’s not good. We could try rsync, maybe that will help:

rsync -r /big_dir /efs_dir

real    1m10.210s
user    0m0.931s
sys     0m1.744s

Even longer! Why is this? It’s because:

Metadata I/O occurs if your application performs metadata-intensive, operations such as, "ls," "rm," "mkdir," "rmdir," "lookup," "getattr," or "setattr", and so on. Any operation that requires the system to fetch for the address of a specific block is considered to be a metadata-intensive workload.

rsync is also checking the destination file to see if it needs to sync it, which causes a bottleneck. So plain rsync and cp aren’t an option.

The issue is that Elastic File System is not built for serial operations. That is, copying a file, waiting, and copying the next one. EFS must replicate all the files to multiple locations so there is a delay while it does so. There is also some overhead from NFS, as each filesystem operation is a network call. What EFS is designed for is actually parallel operations. But rsync or cp can’t run in parallel, so you’ll need to manually batch up your files or use this tool that was referenced in the document above called fpsync (Filesystem partitioner sync).

What fpsync can do is split a directory of files up into chunks, and then send those contents in parallel via rsync. This is also possible with GNU Parallel but you’d have to write your own script. fpsync was available on CentOS, and probably many other distributions. Let’s run it out of the box:

fpsync /big_dir /efs_dir

real    0m59.790s
user    0m1.975s
sys     0m3.925s

Not much of an improvement…but why? Because fpsync doesn’t run in parallel by default, and you have to tweak it a bit. Let’s process 100 files at a time using 10 concurrent runners:

# time fpsync -f 100 -n 10 -v /big_dir /efs_dir
1662569967 Info: Run ID: 1662569967-43986
1662569967 ===> Analyzing filesystem...
1662569968 <=== Fpart crawling finished
1662569980 <=== Parts done: 29/29 (100%), remaining: 0
1662569980 <=== Time elapsed: 13s, remaining: ~0s (~0s/job)
1662569980 <=== Fpsync completed without error in 13s.

real    0m13.467s
user    0m2.086s
sys     0m4.400s

Much better! But let’s try more concurrent runners. Since we had 3000 files, there would have been a queue in our last command (100*10 = 1000). So let’s run 50 batches of 50 files each:

# fpsync -f 50 -n 50 -v /big_dir /efs_dir
1662570120 Info: Run ID: 1662570120-51913
1662570120 ===> Analyzing filesystem...
1662570122 <=== Fpart crawling finished
1662570129 <=== Parts done: 58/58 (100%), remaining: 0
1662570129 <=== Time elapsed: 9s, remaining: ~0s (~0s/job)
1662570129 <=== Fpsync completed without error in 9s.

real    0m8.903s
user    0m2.093s
sys     0m4.868s

So, the more concurrent copy operations we can run, the better.

On a regular disk this wouldn’t have any effect since the filesystem operations are negligible and your only bottleneck is the disk speed. It might even slow it down. There may be some other options inside of fpsync that would speed it up even more. What about rsync --inplace? This would eliminate a step that rsync would usually take, which is to create a new file, then rename it.

#  time fpsync -o "--inplace" -f 100 -n 50 -v /big_dir /efs_dir
1662584365 Info: Run ID: 1662584365-126224
1662584365 ===> Analyzing filesystem...
1662584367 <=== Fpart crawling finished
1662584371 <=== Parts done: 29/29 (100%), remaining: 0
1662584371 <=== Time elapsed: 6s, remaining: ~0s (~0s/job)
1662584371 <=== Fpsync completed without error in 6s.

real    0m5.872s
user    0m1.634s
sys     0m3.438s

Running batches of 100 brought it down to under 6s. After that it started to get slower. Also running a huge number of rsyncs and small batches got slower. This is likely due to the system itself – after all, it’s running 250+ instance of rsync.