LVM Performance overhead?

Question

I would be thankfull if someone who understands how LVM works, could tell me a rough estimate, how much slower using LVM (with a Software RAID1) will be.

(What I do not want to know how much slower LVM will be if the LVM Volume is currently in snapshot mode doing Copy on Write). I only need some rough estmiate how much LVM will slow down reads and writes in a normal operation scenario.

Any links are also very much appreciated I was not able to find any good performance benachmarks about this question.

Thanks very much!! Jens

Answer 1

LVM is fairly lightweight for just normal volumes (without snapshots, for example). It's really just a table lookup in a fairly small table that block X is actually block Y on device Z. I've never done any benchmarking, but I've never noticed any performance differences between LVM and just using the raw device. It's some small extra CPU overhead on the disc I/O, so I really wouldn't expect much difference.

My gut reaction is that the reason there are no benchmarks is that there just isn't that much overhead in LVM.

The convenience of LVM, and being able to slice and dice and add more drives, IMHO, far outweighs what little (if any) performance difference there may be.

Answer 2

with snapshot active lvm performs ... badly.

take a look here to see in-depth benchmark

Answer 3

There is an excellent (be it old) whitepaper, written by a SUSE guy, about LVM and it's overhead here. It shows some (simple) benchmarks and explains the tech behind LVM. Good read.