Thursday, November 1, 2007

LVM bad hair day

Logical Volume Management (LVM) for Linux is nice, but the snapshot feature kills your hard disk. That was my conclusion after messing about with snapshots as a cheap-n-easy chroot solution, a la the Debian schroot package.

I set up two snapshots and started writing a 5 GB file to each. 6 hours later (!) the job was done, in the meantime the box was as good as dead.

This spurred me on to investigate the LVM snapshot performance, and boy is it bad!