On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Matt Harrington wrote:
I'm evaluating a NAS filer similar to the ones sold by NetApp and Auspex. This particular model is made by Nitech in Irvine, CA. These NFS vendors speak about benchmarks in ops/sec. It's more intuitive for me to think of benchmarks in terms of MB/sec throughputs for a large file write or read.
This is because local storage will always be faster than NAS if the only thing you look at is raw sequential throughput. Throughput to an NFS server will come naturally through the evolution of faster networks, so these vendors are optimizing for transaction speed: if they can unlink 5000 files per second but your local filesystem can only sustain 1000 unlink/sec, NFS will seem faster despite a raw bandwidth disadvantage.
Having said that though...
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/oracle_backup/bigfile bs=30k count=5000 5000+0 records in 5000+0 records out 0.07u 3.95s 0:15.83 25.3%
# bc -l bc 1.04 Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 30*5000/15.83 9475.67909033480732785849
/oracle_backup is a filesystem on an F740 connected to a 1x300-MHz Sun E450 via full-duplex 100baseT. It should be able to hit wire speed with that setup, but for some reason it doesn't. Both boxes are idle, but I haven't done any special tuning (UDP, v3, 32K blocks).
My quick-and-dirty tests show that I can write at 1.8 MByte/sec over a 100Mbit network using NFS v3. I can FTP at about 7 MByte/sec.
My question is: do these numbers seem reasonable? If not, what aspects of NFS should I tweak?
Well, my NFS numbers are already beating your FTP numbers. ;-)