What are the specs on your PC? Say you have an ATA 100 controller and a drive with 8MB ram you can probably get hit a 30MB/s transfer rate while if you are doing nfs over 100 BASET the best you can hope to do is 12MB/s. If you have a PCI 64/66 or PCI-X bus in You may hit transfer rates of over 50-60MB/S with GE in both filer and PC. When your PC needs to read and write data he just does it he does not have to create IP traffic every time. That means he has to do a little more work to transfer using jumbo frames will free up some of this overhead. Its an option to consider. You might also want to dd a 1 GB file over the network using different block size to see what performance you get.

-----Original Message----- From: 'Aditya ' [mailto:aditya@grot.org] Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 7:04 PM To: Maxwell Reid Cc: 'toasters@mathworks.com ' Subject: Re: Running Postgresql with db on Netapp

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 03:41:28PM -0700, Maxwell Reid wrote:

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.

I'd consider that, however I'm having a hard time believing that a PC a *stinkeen* plain-ol-IDE drive is doing better than my filer.

I can blame (in order of cost of upgrade):

- a configuration mistake - mount options - filer options - network hardware - nfs - pc hardware - postgresql

and I'm slowly working my way down that list...(grin)

I suspect that folks running Oracle/Informix with a filer aren't seeing more than a 10% performance reduction, otherwise very few would opt to do it, so I suspect that it works, it works well and I must be missing something...

Thanks, Adi