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Performance and optimization
This section describes guidance and best practices for optimizing File Gateway performance.
Basic performance guidance for FSx File Gateway
In this section, you can find guidance for provisioning hardware for your FSx File Gateway VM. The instance configurations that are listed in the table are examples, and are provided for reference.
For best performance, the cache disk size must be tuned to the size of the active working set. Using multiple local disks for the cache increases write performance by parallelizing access to data and leads to higher IOPS.
Note
We don't recommend using ephemeral storage. For information about using ephemeral storage, see Using ephemeral storage with EC2 gateways.
The suggested size limit for individual directories in the file systems that you connect to File Gateway is 10,000 files per directory. You can use File Gateway with directories that have more than 10,000 files, but performance might be impacted.
In the following tables, cache hit read operations are reads from the file data that is served from cache. Cache miss read operations are reads from the file data that is served from Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
The following table shows an example FSx File Gateway configuration.
FSx File Gateway performance on Windows clients
| Example Configuration | Protocol | Write throughput (file sizes 1 GB) | Cache hit read throughput | Cache miss read throughput |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Root disk: 80 GB, io1 SSD, 4,000 IOPS Cache disks: 2 x 2 TiB NVME Minimum network performance: 10 Gbps CPU: 32 vCPU | RAM: 244 GB |
SMBv3 - 1 thread | 162 MiB/sec (1.4 Gbps) | 403 MiB/sec (3.4 Gbps) | 288 MiB/sec (2.4 Gbps) |
| SMBv3 - 8 threads | 511 MiB/sec (4.3 Gbps) | 571 MiB/sec (4.8 Gbps) | 567 MiB/sec (4.8 Gbps) |
Note
Your performance might vary based on your host platform configuration and network bandwidth. Write throughput performance decreases with file size, with the highest achievable throughput for small files (less than 32MiB) being 16 files per second.
Optimizing gateway performance
You can find information following about how to optimize the performance of your gateway. The guidance is based on adding resources to your gateway and adding resources to your application server.
Add Resources to Your Gateway
You can optimize gateway performance by adding resources to your gateway in one or more of the following ways.
- Use higher-performance disks
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To optimize gateway performance, you can add high-performance disks such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and a NVMe controller. You can also attach virtual disks to your VM directly from a storage area network (SAN) instead of the Microsoft Hyper-V NTFS. Improved disk performance generally results in better throughput and more input/output operations per second (IOPS). For information about adding disks, see Configuring additional cache storage.
To measure throughput, use the
ReadBytesandWriteBytesmetrics with theSamplesAmazon CloudWatch statistic. For example, theSamplesstatistic of theReadBytesmetric over a sample period of 5 minutes divided by 300 seconds gives you the IOPS. As a general rule, when you review these metrics for a gateway, look for low throughput and low IOPS trends to indicate disk-related bottlenecks.Note
CloudWatch metrics are not available for all gateways. For information about gateway metrics, see Monitoring your FSx File Gateway.
- Add CPU resources to your gateway host
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The minimum requirement for a gateway host server is four virtual processors. To optimize gateway performance, confirm that the four virtual processors that are assigned to the gateway VM are backed by four cores. In addition, confirm that you are not oversubscribing the CPUs of the host server.
When you add additional CPUs to your gateway host server, you increase the processing capability of the gateway. Doing this allows your gateway to deal with, in parallel, both storing data from your application to your local storage and uploading this data to FSx for Windows File Server. Additional CPUs also help ensure that your gateway gets enough CPU resources when the host is shared with other VMs. Providing enough CPU resources has the general effect of improving throughput.
Storage Gateway supports using 24 CPUs in your gateway host server. You can use 24 CPUs to significantly improve the performance of your gateway. We recommend the following gateway configuration for your gateway host server:
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24 CPUs.
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16 GiB of reserved RAM for File Gateways
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16 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size up to 16 TiB
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32 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 16 TiB to 32 TiB
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48 GiB of reserved RAM for gateways with cache size 32 TiB to 64 TiB
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Disk 1 attached to paravirtual controller 1, to be used as the gateway cache as follows:
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SSD using an NVMe controller.
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Network adapter 1 configured on VM network 1:
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Use VM network 1 and add VMXnet3 (10 Gbps) to be used for ingestion.
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Network adapter 2 configured on VM network 2:
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Use VM network 2 and add a VMXnet3 (10 Gbps) to be used to connect to Amazon.
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- Back gateway virtual disks with separate physical disks
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When you provision gateway disks, we strongly recommend that you don't provision local disks for local storage that use the same underlying physical storage disk. For example, for VMware ESXi, the underlying physical storage resources are represented as a data store. When you deploy the gateway VM, you choose a data store on which to store the VM files. When you provision a virtual disk (for example, as an upload buffer), you can store the virtual disk in the same data store as the VM or a different data store.
If you have more than one data store, then we strongly recommend that you choose one data store for each type of local storage you are creating. A data store that is backed by only one underlying physical disk can lead to poor performance. An example is when you use such a disk to back both the cache storage and upload buffer in a gateway setup. Similarly, a data store that is backed by a less high-performing RAID configuration such as RAID 1 can lead to poor performance.
Add Resources to Your Application Environment
- Increase the bandwidth between your application server and your gateway
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To optimize gateway performance, ensure that the network bandwidth between your application and the gateway can sustain your application needs. You can use the
ReadBytesandWriteBytesmetrics of the gateway to measure the total data throughput.For your application, compare the measured throughput with the desired throughput. If the measured throughput is less than the desired throughput, then increasing the bandwidth between your application and gateway can improve performance if the network is the bottleneck. Similarly, you can increase the bandwidth between your VM and your local disks, if they're not direct-attached.
- Add CPU resources to your application environment
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If your application can use additional CPU resources, then adding more CPUs can help your application to scale its I/O load.
Some file operations on the FSx File Gateway, such as top-level folder renames or permission changes, can result in multiple file operations that lead to a high I/O load on your FSx for Windows File Server file system. If your file system doesn't have enough performance resources for your workload, the file system might delete shadow copies because it prioritizes availability for ongoing I/O over historical shadow copy retention.
In the Amazon FSx console, check the Monitoring and performance page to see if your file system is under-provisioned. If it is, you can switch to SSD storage, increase throughput capacity, or increase SSD IOPS to handle your workload.