On Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 08:14:25AM -0700, Brian Pawlowski wrote:
Do any of our customers out there have some measurements of Sun client throughput?
It blows, basically... :( Nevertheless, I think you can get higher with a few little tweaks. Still, in my applications the crappy unlink() speed will take you out longs before you run out of throughput. Or perhaps you've already made the tweaks and it still sucks...
I thought I could use a 2 x 400MHz Ultra Enterprise E250 with a new Sun GbE card in it as a killer client, and I find that with V3 32KB UDP packets, the sucker rolls over at
~30 MB/s
with 2 CPUs pinned at 99% in system time.
This *sucks*.
Well, I'm used a 4x400MHz E3000 with the Sun GB 2.0 cards - note that the 2.0 cards are MUCH better than the 1.0 stuff! I can't remember if I used the E3000 PCI adapter thingy or the "straight-up" SBus version of the Gbit card..
I'm assming you already have:
nfs.udp.xfersize 32768
On the filer.
I also addeded:
set nfs:nfs3_nra = 6 set nfs:nfs3_max_threads = 16
in /etc/system on the Sun box for a little more NFS umpfh. It sort of "artificially" inflates the load values since more threads are blocking, but it does seem to help throughput, even on 100BaseT connections.
I also run:
/usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_xmit_hiwat 32768 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_recv_hiwat 32768 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_cwnd_max 65534 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/udp udp_xmit_hiwat 16384 # max. UDP PDU size for sending /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/udp udp_recv_hiwat 49152 # queue for UDP PDUs (3 * ICP)
To get the buffer sizes up to a more reasonable count.
Using this combo, I was able to ~40MB/s if I remember correctly.. I was only testing, so I don't have a GByte system up and running right now.. Also check your switch settings. I found quite a bit of difference on a Cat5500 depending on if you allowed auto flow-control, and such things..
I am totally client bound.
A real let-down, isn't it.. :(
Has anyone sized Sun clients out there? Are the PCI clients dogs? Is the new GbE card from Sun a loser? Should I go grab a new Alteon card for the Sun?
What is your killer high performance client?
I'd love to hear people's experience as well. I really need to do more testing with various machines (SBus vs. PCI for ex) and Gbit card vendors to see where the real problems lie.. But so far Gbit performance is slower than I would have hoped. At least it doesn't max the CPU on the filer like trunked ethernet does. :-)
-Mark
It seems a function of the Sun E250 - 100BaseT seems to scale only to 30 MB/s before running out of CPU...
Broken-hearted in Amsterdam, beepy