Modes

Last edited 149 days ago by Kirtan Chavda

Performance Modes

Amazon EFS offers two performance modes, General Purpose and Max I/O.

General Purpose mode has the lowest per-operation latency and is the default performance mode for file systems. One Zone file systems always use the General Purpose performance mode. For faster performance, we recommend always using General Purpose performance mode.

Max I/O mode is a previous generation performance type that is designed for highly parallelized workloads that can tolerate higher latencies than the General Purpose mode. Max I/O mode is not supported for One Zone file systems or file systems that use Elastic throughput.

Important

Due to the higher per-operation latencies with Max I/O, we recommend using General Purpose performance mode for all file systems.

To help ensure that your workload stays within the IOPS limit available to file systems using General Purpose performance mode, you can monitor the PercentIOLimit CloudWatch metric. For more information, see

Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EFS⁠

Applications can scale their IOPS elastically up to the limit associated with the performance mode. You are not billed separately for IOPS; they are included in a file system's throughput accounting. Every Network File System (NFS) request is accounted for as 4 kilobyte (KB) of throughput, or its actual request and response size, whichever is larger.

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Throughput modes

A file system's throughput mode determines the throughput available to your file system. Amazon EFS offers three throughput modes: Elastic, Provisioned, and Bursting. Read throughput is discounted to allow you to drive higher read throughput than write throughput. The maximum throughput available with each throughput mode depends on the AWS Region. For more information about the maximum file system throughput in the different regions, see

Amazon EFS quotas⁠

Your file system can achieve a combined 100% of its read and write throughput. For example, if your file system is using 33% of its read throughput limit, the file system can simultaneously achieve up to 67% of its write throughput limit. You can monitor your file system’s throughput usage in the Throughput utilization (%) graph on the on the File System Detail page of the console. For more information, see

Using CloudWatch metrics to monitor throughput performance⁠

Choosing the correct throughput mode for a file system

Choosing the correct throughput mode for your file system depends on your workload's performance requirements.

Elastic throughput (Recommended) – Use the default Elastic throughput when you have spiky or unpredictable workloads and performance requirements that are difficult to forecast, or when your application drives throughput at an average-to-peak ratio of 5% or less. For more information, see

Elastic throughput⁠

Provisioned throughput – Use Provisioned throughput if you know your workload's performance requirements, or when your application drives throughput at an average-to-peak ratio of 5% or more. For more information, see

Provisioned throughput⁠

Bursting throughput – Use Bursting throughput when you want throughput that scales with the amount of storage in your file system.

If, after using Bursting throughput, you find that your application is throughput-constrained (for example, it uses more than 80% of the permitted throughput or you have used all of your burst credits), then you should use either Elastic or Provisioned throughput. For more information, see

Bursting throughput⁠

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to determine your workload's average-to-peak ratio by comparing the MeteredIOBytes metric to the PermittedThroughput metric. For more information about Amazon EFS metrics, see

Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon EFS⁠

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Automatic backups are enabled by default and use AWS Backup.

Lifecycle management moves files that have not been accessed for a period of time to the EFS Infrequent Access Storage class.

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Performance Modes

Important

Throughput modes

Choosing the correct throughput mode for a file system

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