Scott,

You are seeing a performance hit because the Filer needs to do SID lookups to run the quota reports for CIFS. Unfortunately there is no way around this except to not run the quota reports as often (as you discovered) or schedule them to run off hours (if you have any). My understanding is that OnTap 6.2R2 does SID caching so once you get to that version of OnTap (assuming it does the cache the SID) you shouldn't see this as a problem any longer.

From: Scott Mikusko guerilla@concentric.net Reply-To: Scott Mikusko guerilla@concentric.net To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: quota and running CIFS Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 19:29:59 -0400 (EDT)

Comrades,

I have a filer running NFS & CIFS with about 200Gb of data. We run quota reports fairly often (used to be every 15 minutes but now every 4 hours) to keep track of user account space. We've noticed that when quota runs, the performance of the box takes a big hit. The CPU gets pegged at 100% for up to 2 minutes, the NFS performance degrades such that moving a large file (say 10MB) can take nearly a minute!

We don't see this sort of thing on straight-NFS filers, only on our F840 filer (running 6.1.R1) running both protocols. The mode running is NFS (not mixed). Normally a quota run on an NFS filer with the same amount of files/users is less than 30 seconds, if that. But this NFS/CIFS box is taking AGES.

The hit on the box is so strong that it's really affecting our serving files to web users that have webpages hosted on the box. It's reached a point where I think Netapp's CIFS and/or quota implementation is seriously screwed. I might have to look at BlueArc or some other vendor for running our CIFS-based apps, as this is just not cutting it.

Anyone else notice this sort of thing on other boxes, be it F840s or F760s?

-Scott

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