Hi Aditya,

Is it possible to install a Gigabit adapter  in the *BSD box and filer?  That alone will probably give you a good performance boost... Switching to udp probably won't improve things, but using Gbe and jumbo frames will do wonders.

Regards,
max

-----Original Message-----
From: Aditya
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Sent: 9/15/2003 2:57 PM
Subject: Running Postgresql with db on Netapp

Hi,

We've been running Postgresql (7.2.x) on FreeBSD with the database
files on a Netapp F85. The mounts are NFSv3/TCP with no special tuning
on the filer or client. This is a single db server accessing the
database on a rw mount so there are no traditional filesystem locking
problems (AFAIK).

We seem to have hit a performance wall (vs. a linux box with local IDE
drive) and I've been reading the various whitepapers on the NetApp
website about Oracle/Informix and filers and started to follow the
recommendations:

- checked that all interfaces on nfs client/switch/filer are
100baseTX-FD

- turned minra on, which made the filer slightly more responsive but
nothing spectacular

- changed the mount options to include -w=32768,-r=32768 with no
perceptible difference (also increased it to 65536 for both r and w
with no change)

- turned fsync off in Postgres (yes, I know it's risky, but I'm trying
to figure out why this is so borked)

- unlike solaris there is no "direct access" mode in FreeBSD to
prevent the NFS client from caching which is 2x as wasteful since the
db is also caching

You can see the general performance stats (which are matched by "human
perception" testing) for this filer ever since we turned on a
heavy-duty application last Thursday:

 
http://dev.zapatec.com/website/internal/stats/netapp/zilch.pr.zapatec.co
m/

and the various tweaking described above hasn't made much of a
difference as you can see from the graphs (5 minute averages).

current sysstat snapshot is pretty consistent and looks like this:

zilch> sysstat 1
 CPU    NFS   CIFS   HTTP      Net kB/s    Disk kB/s     Tape kB/s
Cache
                               in   out    read write    read write
age
  9%   1450      0      0    1324  3726    3392     0       0     0
0
  8%   1744      0      0    1323  3863    3916     0       0     0
0
 10%   1588      0      0    1539  3617    3048     0       0     0
0
  9%   1940      0      0    2251  3149    3140     4       0     0
0
  8%   1718      0      0     401  3750    3288  2816       0     0
0
 10%   1440      0      0    2327  3253    3504     0       0     0
0
  9%   1648      0      0    2052  3504    3308     0       0     0
0
 10%   1425      0      0    1625  3459    3172     0       0     0
0
  8%   1709      0      0    1925  3167    3184     0       0     0
0

Any suggestions or hints of what to try other than don't run a db over
NFS if you want performance:

 
http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2000-December/000072.html

After all, I presume that Oracle and Informix using a filer are doing
well enough that people stick with the filer?

Thanks,
Adi
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