Linux ZFS does not buffer writes to write buffer (SLOG/ZIL)?

When experiencing write I/O, the log column in zpool iostat -v does not show any ZIL activity, ever. This results in higher than expected wait times when writing data to disk (sometimes over 80ms during contention).

                     capacity     operations    bandwidth
    pool              alloc   free   read  write   read  write
----------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  
storage           1.88T  2.09T      3  3.01K   512K  39.3M
  mirror           961G  1.05T      0  1.97K   128K  20.8M
    mpathf            -      -      0    393      0  20.8M
    mpathg            -      -      0    391   128K  20.6M
  mirror           961G  1.05T      2  1.04K   384K  18.5M
    mpathi            -      -      1    379   256K  21.1M
    mpathj            -      -      0    281   128K  18.3M
logs                  -      -      -      -      -      -
  /zlog/zilcache      0  15.9G      0      0      0      0
cache                 -      -      -      -      -      -
  mpathk           232G     8M      1      0   130K      0
  mpathl           232G     8M      1      0   130K      0
----------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

My /zlog/zilcache device never has any IO. It is a file on very fast flash. I can write and read it when I remove it from the ZFS store, but ZFS seems to ignore it.

The device looks available:

  pool: storage
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 19h31m with 0 errors on Wed Nov 19 07:39:03 2014
config:

    NAME              STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    storage           ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0        ONLINE       0     0     0
        mpathf        ONLINE       0     0     0
        mpathg        ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-1        ONLINE       0     0     0
        mpathi        ONLINE       0     0     0
        mpathj        ONLINE       0     0     0
    logs
      /zlog/zilcache  ONLINE       0     0     0
    cache
      mpathk          ONLINE       0     0     0
      mpathl          ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Any way to configure ZFS to cache writes to the logs device for faster acknowledgements?

Thanks

Solution 1:

I believe you are misunderstanding the ZIL purpose. You describe it as a write cache which it is not. No activity on the ZIL might just be a normal behavior depending on what is running on your machine.

Nothing is ever read from the ZIL, this is a write only device. The only exception would possibly occur during a pool import after a crash.

There are only writes to it if applications are performing synchronous writes. Regular I/Os like moving files around are not using the ZIL.

You can set sync=always on the dataset to force all writes to behave as if they were synchronous.