The Challenge
This is a follow up article from using a USB drive for a LVM cache. I decided to test things further by using a RAM disk instead of a USB drive.
The Journey
1. Create a RAM disk:
modprobe brd rd_nr=1 rd_size=4585760 max_part=0
2. Create the cache
pvcreate /dev/ram0
vgextend vg /dev/ram0
lvcreate -L 300M -n cache_meta vg /dev/ram0
lvcreate -L 4G -n cache_vol vg /dev/ram0
lvconvert –type cache-pool –poolmetadata vg/cache_meta –cachemode=writeback vg/cache_vol -y
lvconvert –type cache –cachepool vg/cache_vol vg/docker-pool
3. Run the DD test again
[root@tokyo /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1G bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.89586 s, 553 MB/s
[root@tokyo /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1G bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.79864 s, 583 MB/s
[root@tokyo /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1G bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 0.922467 s, 1.1 GB/s
[root@tokyo /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/1G bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.33757 s, 784 MB/sAverage Speed: 736 MB/s
Conclusion
In Conclusion, my average write speed is 736 MB/s using LVM caching with a RAM disk. With a USB thumb drive, my average speed is 411.25 MB/s. With no cache, my average speed is 256 MB/s.