some simple nfs-benchmarks on 5.4 RC2

[Eric Anderson]

Claus Guttesen wrote:
> 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:


rsync is CPU intensive, so depending on how much cpu you were using for this, 
you may or may not gain.  How busy was the server during that time?  Is this to 
a single IDE disk?  If so, you are probably bottlenecked by that IDE drive.


Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never.
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