When the clients that are connected to volumes on a cluster increase their I/O requests, the cluster must work harder to meet the demand. If you know which clients have a high number of I/O requests to a particular volume on the cluster, you can improve cluster performance by adjusting the number of clients accessing the volume or decreasing the amount of I/O to the volume. You can also apply or increase a limit on the QoS policy group of which the volume is a member.

You can investigate clients and their applications to determine whether the clients are sending more I/O than usual, which might be causing contention on a cluster component. On the Event details page, the System Diagnosis section displays the top volume workloads using the component in contention. If you know which client is accessing a particular volume, you can go to the client to determine whether the client hardware or an application is not operating as expected or is doing more work than usual.

In a MetroCluster configuration, write requests to a volume on a local cluster are mirrored to a volume on the remote cluster. Keeping the source volume on the local cluster in sync with the destination volume on the remote cluster can also increase the demand of both clusters in the MetroCluster configuration. By reducing write requests to these mirrored volumes, the clusters can perform fewer sync operations, which reduces the performance impact on other workloads.