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#34220 Kickstart extraction fails on Amazon EFS server

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Environment Information

PHP version
n/a
CMS Type
Other
CMS Version
n/a
Backup Tool Version
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Kickstart version
n/a

Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 14 December 2020 10:03 CST

bob.clinton

Migrating Joomla sites from AWS server to AWS EFS server. Benchmarking a single site reveals that current AWS server extracts files in 11 -15 seconds. AWS EFS server takes over 30 minutes to extract the same 345,654.031 JPA file.

I was able to eventually extract and install two sites. The third site stopped extracting with no apparent error. Debug.txt is attached. Total number of sites to migrate is fifteen. AWS EFS is supposed to be an elastic environment that adjusts as directory volume grows, but it appears that I am hitting a disk space ot time out issue and kickstart is not anticipating the expanding environment.  

Has anybody reported a similar issue and are there any server configurations that need to be  made?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Benchmarking a single site reveals that current AWS server extracts files in 11 -15 seconds. AWS EFS server takes over 30 minutes to extract the same 345,654.031 JPA file.

So, AWS EFS is slow as hell is what you're telling me. Namely, 99.94% slower. In other words it is unsuitable for the task at hand.

Using basic common sense will tell you why. Kickstart needs to read stuff from the backup archive and write it to the disk. However, you went from a fast SSD to something the speed of a slow floppy drive from the early 1980s (and yes, I'm old enough to have used the real article). This means that everything takes much, MUCH longer to run. PHP has a time limit. Therefore you will probably reach it, even though Kickstart is actively trying to minimize that possibility. It will reach it because even writing 64Kb might take several minutes due to the elasticity of the storage's avaialbility.

Clearly, AWS EFS is not the right thing to use for this task. It has unreliable performance characteristics. It is overall slow. It is great for long term, infrequently accessed storage with relatively speedy sequential read. Like S3. In fact, it's BECAUSE it uses S3 under the hood that has these characteristics! It's NOT suitable for your site's files. That's why Amazon also has EBS which is high performance, elastic block storage. What you need is EBS not EFS. 

In any case I am closing your ticket because it falls under the category of hosting issue which is outside our control.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
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