So I run a small Kubernetes cluster (k3s) backed by MariaDB hosted on a Synology NAS with only HDDs rather than etcd colocated on the control nodes. For resiliency purposes it’s been great, nodes are basically pure compute resources I can wipe out and recreate with ease and not worry about data loss. However, for over a year now I’ve lived with the constant chatter of active hard drives in my office.
The Kube DB workload is extremely read heavy and very active: many thousands of selects per minutes with only a handful of writes. Clickclickclickclickclickclick. Seems like a good case for caching, and luckily my NAS has 2 NVMe slots for an SSD cache. I bought a couple data center drives with PLP (Kingston DC1000B, probably overkill, but not crazy expensive), pop them in, set up a read/write cache for the database and Kube NFS volumes and…silence, wonderful silence. It’s almost constantly at 100% cache hits. Bonus points if things are faster as well.
I’m very happy. Never optimized an application for noise levels before 😁.
I considered it but RAM is very limited on the NAS and the cluster nodes, it’s my primary bottleneck. it would also be more volitile. the two SSDs are RAID 1 redundant, just like the underlying HDDs, in addition to the built in power loss protection on the drives. RAM discs are great if you can spare them and have a UPS though.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
Make sure your drive firmware is updated. A surprising amount of SSDs have firmware bugs that cause premature wearout.
Personally, if I could fit the cache in RAM, I’d just do that.
I considered it but RAM is very limited on the NAS and the cluster nodes, it’s my primary bottleneck. it would also be more volitile. the two SSDs are RAID 1 redundant, just like the underlying HDDs, in addition to the built in power loss protection on the drives. RAM discs are great if you can spare them and have a UPS though.