The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a very intriguing storage product. It provides simple, scalable, elastic file storage for use on an EC2 virtual machine. The file system can be mounted over NFS at one or more EC2 machines simultaneously, and it also supports file locking.

Here are some important facts which I found out while doing my tests:

• I/O operations per second (IOPS) are not the same metric that we’re used to measure when dealing with block devices like HDD or SSD disks. When working with EFS, we measure the NFS I/O operations per second. These correspond 1:1 to the read() or write() system calls that your applications make.
• The size of the issued I/O requests are another very important metric for EFS. This is the real bytes transfer between your EC2 instance and the NFS server.
• Therefore, we’re limited by both the NFS I/O requests per second, and the total transferred bytes for those NFS I/O per second.
• The EFS performance and EFS limits documentation pages give a lot of insight. You have to monitor your EFS metrics using CloudWatch.
• NFS I/O requests smaller than 4096 bytes are accounted as 4096 bytes. Regardless if you request 1 bytes, 1000 bytes, or 4096 bytes, you will get 4096 bytes accounted. Once you request more than 4096 bytes, they are accounted correctly.
• You need more than one reader/writer thread or program, in order to achieve the full IOPS potential. One writer thread in my tests did 130 op/s, while 20 writer threads did 1500 op/s, for example.
• The documentation says: “In General Purpose mode, there is a limit of 7000 file system operations per second. This operations limit is calculated for all clients connected to a single file system”. Our tests confirm this — we could do 3500 reading or 3000 writing operations per second.
• CloudWatch has different aggregation functions for the *IOBytes metrics: min/max/average; sum; count. They represent different aspects of your EFS metrics, namely: the min/max/average IO operation size in bytes; the total transferred bytes in a minute (you need to divide to 60 to get the “per second” value); the total operations in a minute (you need to divide to 60 to get the “per second” value).
• The CloudWatch EFS metrics “DataReadIOBytes” and “DataWriteIOBytes” reflect exactly what we see on the Linux system for “kB/s” and “ops/s” by the nfsiostat program. The transferred bytes reflect exactly the used bandwidth on the Linux network interfaces.
• The “Metered size” in the AWS Console which is the same value as what you see by the “df” command is not updated in real-time. It could take more than an hour to reflect the real disk usage.
• There is plenty of initial burst credit balance which lets you do some heavy I/O on your freshly created EFS file system. Our benchmark tests ran for hours with block sizes between 1 byte and 10k bytes, and we still had some positive burst credit balance left at the end.

I’m using the default NFS settings by the NFS mount helper provided in the “Amazon Linux 2” OS:

[root@ip-172-31-11-75 ~]# mount -t efs fs-7513e02c:/ /efs

[root@ip-172-31-11-75 ~]# mount
fs-7513e02c.efs.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com:/ on /efs type nfs4 (rw,relatime,vers=4.1,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=172.31.11.75,local_lock=none,addr=172.31.15.76)

The tests were performed using two “m4.xlarge” EC2 instances in the “eu-central” AWS region. This EC2 instance type provides “High” network performance.

The NFS I/O operations per second limits were tested using a simple C program which basically does the following:

fd = open(testfile, O_RDWR|O_DIRECT|O_SYNC);

while (1) {
  lseek(fd, SEEK_SET, 0);

  read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
  // or
  write(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
}

I created 40 different files, so that I can run 40 different single benchmark programs on an EC2 instance – one for each file. This increases concurrency and lets the total throughput scale better.

Sequential writing and reading

Sequential writing and reading performed as expected – up to the “PermittedThroughput” limit shown in the CloudWatch metrics. In my case, for such a small EFS file system, the limit was 105 MB/s.

Writing: NFS I/O operations per second

Here are the results:

• Writing from one EC2 instance using 1 byte, 1k bytes, or 10k bytes: regardless of the request size, we get up to 2000 IOPS. Typically the IOPS are between 1400 and 1700.
• Writing from two EC2 instances using 1 byte, 1k bytes, or 10k bytes: regardless of the request size, we get up to 3000 IOPS in total which are equally spread across the two EC2 instances.
• The “PercentIOLimit” CloudWatch metric shows 84% when we do 2880 ops/s, for example. Therefore, the total IOPS limit for writing is about 3500 ops/s.
• When doing only write() system calls with 1 byte data, only “DataWriteIOBytes” is accounted by EFS which is an advantage for us. A real block file system needs to read the block (usually 4k bytes), update 1 byte in it, and then write it back on disk. I feel like this needs additional testing with more random data, so test for yourself, too. Note that the minimum accounted request size in EFS is 4kB.

Reading: NFS I/O operations per second

Here are the results:

• Reading from one EC2 instance using 1 byte or 10k bytes: regardless of the request size, we get up to 3500 IOPS. One EC2 instance is enough to saturate the EFS limit.
• Reading from two EC2 instances using 1 byte or 10k bytes: regardless of the request size, we get up to 3500 IOPS in total which are equally spread across the two EC2 instances.
• The “PercentIOLimit” CloudWatch metric shows 100% when we do 3500 ops/s. Therefore, the total IOPS limit for reading is 3500 ops/s.