speccing an NFS server -- smp good or bad?

[Crispy Beef]

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC 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 disadvantage?
> 
> Does CPU speed play any great factor (ie, use a 1.8ghz opteron  instead 
> of a 2.2ghz opteron for example)?
> 
> I am planning for a Spring project to make an nfs server that serves  to 
> multiple web servers / application servers using an Areca 1130  SATA 
> raid card.  I assume lots of RAM for the OS to use to cache  would be 
> desirable and GB ethernet.

Have recently built a machine for just this purpose too, although it runs 
Linux, the hardware requirements will be the same.

We needed a huge amount of storage on the network so went for the cheapest 
Opteron available (still overpowered), we put most of the cash into a decent 
motherboard with gigabit ethernet ports and fast PCI-X 3Ware raid cards to run 
the hardrives (the machine has over 3Tb of storage as it's used for video work 
- 16x 300Gb SATA drives).  Also 1Gb of RAM.

The bottlenecks on a server like this are always the network and drives, so 
look at those for performance.