Hi!
I was trying F840 on Solaris 8. Transfer rate with large files was great, but on smal files (2k) was not so good. I used default NFS mount options. Should I do some NFS optimization? Is there a white paper on it?
Best regards, Uros _____________________________
Uros Lampret Our Space Appliances d.o.o. Tbilisijska 59 1000 Ljubljana - Slovenia tel. +386 1 2425 372 fax +386 1 2425 382 email: uros.lampret@ourspace.si internet: www.ourspace.si _____________________________
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 08:18:39AM +0100, Uros Lampret wrote:
Hi!
I was trying F840 on Solaris 8. Transfer rate with large files was great, but on smal files (2k) was not so good.
Small files are always slower than large files, mainly because you have more files for the same amount of data and you transport more smaller data blocks.
Your goal therefore has to be to minimize latency (Gigabit ethernet, fast disk drives) and to maximize caching (NFS v3, some Sol8 kernel tunings).
Filers also handle concurrent loads very well. If you can parallelize your application into multiple threads (and you haven't done so yet), it will become faster. But again, Sol8 kernel tunings might become necessary, especially on multiprocessor machines.
I had asked a similar question of a NetApp engineer when we first got our F720. We also have Solaris 8 here. This may shed some light.
Question how is the NetApp configured? Meaning empasis on reads, writes, large files (xxMB) or small files (xKb) out of the box?
NetApp utilizes caching in two ways NVRAM and regular cache, but not in the conventional ways. When writes are received they are written in NVRAM (this is battery backed up), the write is acknowledged and you are on to the next task. As far as tuning the Filer there are really just a couple of options that can be turned off or on. The Filer is optimized to do one thing handle file I/O, it is not like a standard server or have the associated overhead. If you were looking at single file sizes over 5G there are some concerns, or smaller than 4K (we use 4K blocks so if a single file only took up 1K it would use a 4K block).
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Michael van Elst -
Uros Lampret -
Walt Zapor