Why does flex volume clone split take a long time?
Applies to
- ONTAP 9.3 and below
- Clustered Data ONTAP 8
- Data ONTAP 7-Mode
Answer
- The clone-splitting operation in general might take a considerable amount of time to complete.
- The clone split has to transfer every bit of data and free inodes to the volume that is being cloned.
- Clone split operation is usually a slow process especially when any volume has high inode count.
The clone-splitting operation is a copy operation that might take considerable time and resources to carry out because of the following reasons:
- Free blocks in the aggregate are used to copy blocks shared between the parent and the clone
- Clone-splitting incurs disk I/O operations, and can potentially compete with other disk operations in the aggregate
- Clone-splitting uses some available CPU resources, which may impact the performance of a fully-loaded storage controller
ONTAP addresses the potential performance impact of the clone split operation. The clone split operation runs in the background and priorities are set in such a way that it does not significantly impact foreground operations. Data ONTAP also provides commands to stop or check the status of a clone split operation such as:
vol clone stop cl_vol_name
vol clone status cl_vol_name