speccing an NFS server -- smp good or bad?
Danial Thom
danial_thom at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 9 06:42:43 PST 2006
--- Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.3miasto.net>
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.
>
> > 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.
I agree and disagree :)
As for CPU speed (where you can assume linear
performance benefits as GHZ increase), "Faster"
is always better, although not "necessary". With
a faster cpu and faster ethernet card your
responses will be faster. Every millisecond
counts. Faster machines react faster to requests
and faster machines can fill a wire more
effectively. It won't be overloaded with a slow
processor, but it will be snappier with a faster
processor.
Your premise that 2 processors are faster than 1
is faulty, since FreeBSD sucks at SMP. So avoid
SMP because your performance may even be worse
than with 1 processor. I haven't tested 7.0 yet
but its becoming the story of the OS that cried
"WOLF"; they may get it someday but I'm getting
tired of believing them.
"GB ethernet" is meaningless, since gigabit
controllers and 100Mb/s controllers (these days)
are the same. Many on-board "gigabit" interfaces
are only on 32bit/33Mhz busses. You want a
64-bit/133Mhz card that has a good driver in
FreeBSD. All cards are different. Intels are
good. Some others may be good also.
DT
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