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Best Practices for Optimizing Longhorn Disk Performance

· 2 min read
David Ko
Jillian Maroket

The Longhorn documentation provides best practice recommendations for deploying Longhorn in production environments. Before configuring workloads, ensure that you have set up the following basic requirements for optimal disk performance.

  • SATA/NVMe SSDs or disk drives with similar performance
  • 10 Gbps network bandwidth between nodes
  • Dedicated Priority Classes for system-managed and user-deployed Longhorn components

The following sections outline other recommendations for achieving optimal disk performance.

IO Performance​

  • Storage network: Use a dedicated storage network to improve IO performance and stability.

  • Longhorn disk: Use a dedicated disk for Longhorn storage instead of using the root disk.

  • Replica count: Set the default replica count to "2" to achieve data availability with better disk space usage or less impact to system performance. This practice is especially beneficial to data-intensive applications.

  • Storage tag: Use storage tags to define storage tiering for data-intensive applications. For example, only high-performance disks can be used for storing performance-sensitive data. You can either add disks with tags or create StorageClasses with tags.

  • Data locality: Use best-effort as the default data locality of Longhorn Storage Classes.

    For applications that support data replication (for example, a distributed database), you can use the strict-local option to ensure that only one replica is created for each volume. This practice prevents the extra disk space usage and IO performance overhead associated with volume replication.

    For data-intensive applications, you can use pod scheduling functions such as node selector or taint toleration. These functions allow you to schedule the workload to a specific storage-tagged node together with one replica.

Space Efficiency​

  • Recurring snapshots: Periodically clean up system-generated snapshots and retain only the number of snapshots that makes sense for your implementation.

    For applications with replication capability, periodically delete all types of snapshots.

Disaster Recovery​

  • Recurring backups: Create recurring backup jobs for mission-critical application volumes.

  • System backup: Run periodic system backups.