speccing an NFS server -- smp good or bad?

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On Jan 9, 2006, at 4:32 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>> For a FBSD (or Solaris 10) based server that is only acting as an  
>> NFS server and nothing else, is there any advantage to using an  
>> SMP machine?  Any
>
> no. one CPU is powerful enough. pentium 200 class machine does have  
> no problems working as NFS server for 100Mbit/s LAN at full speed,  
> assuming disk is able to cope with.
>
>> disadvantage?
>>
>> Does CPU speed play any great factor (ie, use a 1.8ghz opteron  
>> instead of a 2.2ghz opteron for example)?
>
> no. with slowest available AMD64 CPU it will still be much  
> overpowered. consider using that machine for other tasks too.
>
> but you will need motherboard with something better than 33Mhz 32- 
> bit PCI and lots of ATA/SATA ports, or extra controllers plugged if  
> you like this server to really be able to do 1000Mbit/s speed.

yes, PCI-X and Areca 1130 12 port SATA Raid card.

I wonder how FreeBSD compares to Solaris 10 for nfs serving.   
"Client" servers are a mix of FreeBSD and Solaris 10.

Thanks
Chad

>
>> card.  I assume lots of RAM for the OS to use to cache would be  
>> desirable and GB ethernet.
>>
> all depends of the type of workload. in case of mostly large file  
> streamed big cache won't help much. in case mostly small subset of  
> files will be used, big cache may be a benefit.
>
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---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
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