On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 11:43:04AM -0600, Hsueh-Mei Tsai(May Tsai) wrote:

Does anybody knows what kind of performance I can expect from using the Gigabit ethernet on Solaris/NetApp?

For example, if mkfile 1024m 1gbfile on a NFS mounted netapp volume thru the gbit interface, how many seconds of response time is considered to be reasonable?

I'm getting about 30secs, while I'm hoping within 12secs, am I dreaming?

30secs looks rather fast, after all that's 30MB/s going to the disks in a single stream.

With a E420R you may want to check:

-> the Gigabit ethernet card should use the single 66MHz PCI slot, the other PCI slots share the same bus with the motherboard devices.

-> filesystem I/O is limited by the virtual memory system. You may want to apply some tuning to the kernel, especially with Sol7, going Sol8 makes things easier.

If the transfer rate, as shown by sysstat, varies a lot you should also play with the flow control settings of the machines and any switches in between. In my experience it is also better to use TCP mounts instead of UDP mounts in this case.

But if mkfile speed is not essential for you, don't try to optimize for it. You will get the best throughput if you can feed the data with several but not too many streams.