topic Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files in Alfresco Archive

Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

dirkvdzee — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:52:13 GMT

Hi all,We are currently evaluating Alfresco for our organisation and some of our customers. Everything is working fine and robust except for one thing;When copying more than 1000 small files to the Alfresco server via CIFS, the average speed goes down to less than 58KB p/s over a local LAN.Eventuall

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

dirkvdzee — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:27:25 GMT

It is surprising to see that there is no answer because since this previous post I found several posts of people having exactly the same problem also without a solution.
On the other hand it does seem to work for (most?) others.

Quick recap:
We have an out of the box Alfresco 3.2 Community installation on Ubuntu 9.04 (and Windows).
The hardware is more than adequate and we used optimized parameters for JVM memory.

The problem is the very, very slow performance of handling multiple files in CIFS during one copy.
Normally, I think, “out the box” should (and probably will) give adequate performance, so there must be a (small?) problem.
We have searched further, did some new tests and came up with new information.

Tests
We started a test to see if the problem was definitely related to the number of files and not the size.
Here is a comparison between copying small and large files:
-   4 files of 5.5MB (total 22MB) were copied in 17 seconds
-   18 small files with a combined size of 134KB were copied in 32 seconds
This confirms the problem lies in adding files (not the size).

After this we tried the Alfresco JLAN server. This is the Open Source Java CIFS server that’s used in Alfresco.
We installed JLAN (just unzip), made a few changes in XML configuration file and started the process on the command line (so no Tomcat).

We did the same performance test:
-   4 files of 5.5MB (total 22MB) were copied in 12 seconds
-   18 small files with a combined size of 134KB were copied in less than 2 seconds
This works fine. So the problem is not in JLAN server.

Remaining factors are either Tomcat (jsvc service) or something in Alfresco (but not the JLAN part).

We really want to use Alfresco.
Anyone have ideas what we can do or test next?
Can we rule out Tomcat as source of the problem someway?

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

loftux — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:56:32 GMT

Just throwing in some ideas
-Try a different database, compared to just using jlan you have lots of db inserts. For community you have the option to try postgresql instead of mysql, available as a separate download.
-Check I/O, is your index located on a really fast disk? Are you running on virtual machines, and are they properly configured for I/O performance?

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

troton — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:01:25 GMT

Same problem with the ubuntu installation out of the box, any news?

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

dirkvdzee — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:25:34 GMT

No virtualization is used and the disk is sata 7200 with a capacity of 500GB.
We did try to install on a completely different (pretty fast) machine, again with the same problem.

Also, we relocated the database on a external (fast) database server, but without any improvement. During the copying operation, the utilization of the database server was very low.
This was expected because monitoring of the database server revealed few queries (there are no users on the system during the copying operation).

Because of the lack of reaction of official Alfresco team members (and others) in this and several similar posts, I think it is likely that there is no real solution (other than perhaps buying very expensive hardware).
So the status is that we are really stuck with Alfresco and, unfortunately, probably need to look at other options. :cry:

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

troton — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:15:54 GMT

I Have tested all the Alfresco 3.x community versions and all of them have several issues with CIFS. We have currently installed the 2.1 version and qe can´t upgrade to 3.x branch becouse this issue!!!

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

jpbarba — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:32:57 GMT

Yes, I have tested several Alfresco Community versions on windows, and there are always problems with CIFS.
Normally, the system halt for a minute during a copy. I haven't detected this problem with Enterprise version.
The Community version 3.2 on Linux works perfectly (CIFS functionality)

Greetings

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

mroessler — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:15:04 GMT

We experience the same poor performance on tests of 3.2r CE. Using Mysql as the database, running on a high-end (IO spread across multiple 15k SAS drives, 24GB RAM, 8 processor) machine. Copying a few hundred small text files (2MB total) into Alfresco over a CIFS share accessed on a gigabit LAN takes approximately 15 minutes. Copying one large (5GB) file does not produce the poor performance results. This is a big concern.

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

rogier_oudshoor — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:33:34 GMT

Actually, this difference is not just there with CIFS - it also happens with Webdav. Alfresco has a per-file overhead since the file isn't just copied on the local hard drive, there are also DB nodes created and search indexes to add. And yes, all of it happens in the same transaction before commit. There are also stability issues too when importing large batches of content at once using Windows clients.

So yes, the number of files is more important then the average filesize. And yes, it's core to Alfresco.

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

loftux — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:37:59 GMT

This issue in Jira might be related https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-1553
Maybe try this suggestion to disable change notifications in CIFS.

Could you try adding the following line to the file-servers.xml, or custom config, where the Alfresco filesystem is defined :-

   <config evaluator="string-compare" condition="Filesystems">
      <filesystems>

         <!– Alfresco repository access shared filesystem –>
         <filesystem name="${filesystem.name}">
            <store>workspace://SpacesStore</store>
            <rootPath>/app:company_home</rootPath>

            <disableChangeNotification/> <!– Add this line –>

            ..
         </filesystem>
      </filesystems>
   </config>

Re: Alfresco 3.2 is very slow with operatins on many small files

mroessler — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:23:53 GMT

I switched databases on our test install from mysql to Oracle. This resolved the slow copy over cifs issue on the test installation. Perhaps the same speed can be achieved with mysql with database tuning by those with experience with mysql.