some simple nfs-benchmarks on 5.4 RC2

[Claus Guttesen]

Hi.

Sorry for x-posting but the thread was originally meant for
freebsd-stable but then a performance-related question slowly emerged
into the message ;-)

Inspired by the nfs-benchmarks by  Willem Jan Withagen I ran some
simple benchmarks against a FreeBSD 5.4 RC2-server. My seven clients
are RC1 and is a mix of i386 and amd64.

The purpose of this test was *not* to measure throughput using various
r/w-sizes. So all clients were mounted using r/w-sizes of 32768. The
only difference was the usage of udp- or tcp-mounts. I only ran the
test once.

The server has net.isr.enable set to 1 (active), gbit-nic is em. Used
'systat -ifstat 1' to measure throughput. The storage is ide->fiber
using a qlogic 2310 hba. It's a dual PIII at 1.3 GHz.

I'm rsyncing to and from the nfsserver, the files are some KB
(thumbnails) and and at most 1 MB (the image itself). The folder is
approx. 1.8 GB. The mix of files very much reflects our load.

       *to* nfs-server  *from* nfs-server
tcp        41 MB/s             100 MB/s
udp       30 MB/s               74 MB/s

In my environment tcp is (quite) faster than udp, so I'll stick to
that in the near future. So eventhough I only made one run the
tcp-times are so much faster and it utilized the cpu more that I
beleive doing more runs would only level the score a bit.

Q:
Will I get better performance upgrading the server from dual PIII to dual Xeon?

A:

regards
Claus