Chapter 10. Cache Settings

The user space implementation of the Ceph block device (i.e, librbd) cannot take advantage of the Linux page cache, so it includes its own in-memory caching, called RBD caching. RBD caching behaves just like well-behaved hard disk caching. When the OS sends a barrier or a flush request, all dirty data is written to the OSDs. This means that using write-back caching is just as safe as using a well-behaved physical hard disk with a VM that properly sends flushes (i.e. Linux kernel >= 2.6.32). The cache uses a Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm, and in write-back mode it can coalesce contiguous requests for better throughput.

Ceph supports write-back caching for RBD. To enable it, add rbd cache = true to the [client] section of your ceph.conf file. By default librbd does not perform any caching. Writes and reads go directly to the storage cluster, and writes return only when the data is on disk on all replicas. With caching enabled, writes return immediately, unless there are more than rbd cache max dirty unflushed bytes. In this case, the write triggers writeback and blocks until enough bytes are flushed.

Ceph supports write-through caching for RBD. You can set the size of the cache, and you can set targets and limits to switch from write-back caching to write through caching. To enable write-through mode, set rbd cache max dirty to 0. This means writes return only when the data is on disk on all replicas, but reads may come from the cache. The cache is in memory on the client, and each RBD image has its own. Since the cache is local to the client, there’s no coherency if there are others accessing the image. Running GFS or OCFS on top of RBD will not work with caching enabled.

The ceph.conf file settings for RBD should be set in the [client] section of your configuration file. The settings include:

rbd cache

rbd cache size

rbd cache max dirty

rbd cache target dirty

rbd cache max dirty age

rbd cache writethrough until flush