Hi,
...
On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Doug Mildram wrote:
doug.mildram> far off the intended topic of enet link layer stuff,
I think these questions are important and I appreciate them since I'm
still in the planning/implementation stage.
do you know anyone who uses a redhatlike kernel for high performance
NFS server?
I don't really know anyone. That is, I don't really know anyone in 'the
business' who are doing things like this--except for maybe the bblisa
folks (hopefully), which is why I asked.
To augment my "critical" NetApp data, I brought up (briefly)
some redhat7 systems as NFS servers and......man....they were terrible.
(symptom: even with enuf memory (1-2gb), the OS crawled to a near-death
slowness, with the load average running up to 20 ("client" jobs
never got my rh7 boxes load avg over 2).
I admit I didnt try hard enough with a 2.6 kernel. (at the time,
I had to try building 2.5 myself, and it just didnt seem to help.)
I'd be inspired to hear that Fedora has a better NFS server,
(and I kinda thought fedora's focus was homeuser/multigizmo...)
Yes, I have always considered Redhat in that regard too. But I doubt that
RedHat Enterprise Linux is intended as a home user type system, and as I
understand it, Fedora Core are the release candidates for RHEL.
On that note, Yellow Dog Linux (for the PPC architecture) is built on
Fedora and is intended as a high performance system (and in fact, that's
what I'm replacing, a dual g4 Xserve running YDL 3 running kernel 2.4.20.
It's done a decent job but it's old and becoming unstable).
At times we've had over 50 machines reading/writing intensively to an
exported 1.2TB filesystem from this box. (2 clusters and a number of
other standalone servers). We never considered it too slow, but we had
no relative experience to compare it too. Now we will.
To solve my need, I converted (24) ancient P500 desktops to freeBSD4.8
nfs servers (each with 1 disk and 1 100mb card). And they rock.
FreeBSD5.4 came along later/recently, and it is equally good.
My situation is unique where
a) this particular data is somewhat disposable, and
b) I spread/allocate 1-2 users (engrs running HW simulations, many GB/day)
average per NFS server..so it's a pain in the * approach to
distributing the load.
I prefer FreeBSD too. My choice of Linux was really for two reasons:
All of our systems are linux (except for the special 'sysadmin' boxes
which are FreeBSD). The staff here who know their way around
unix compatible systems know linux because so much of their research
software is written for it. If I can get good performance out of linux
then if I get hit by a bus these folks won't be left high and dry with a
system that *looks* familiar but is different enough to cause
much confusion.
Although we are only going to be exporting two separate 1.3 TB filesystems
I can easily see us hitting grant jackpot and buying one of those fancy 7
TB Xserve RAIDs. I was under the impression that there are still
outstanding issues with filesystems over 2TB on FreeBSD.
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk/index.html
Have you ever worked with large filesystems > 2TB on FreeBSD?
Ah the heck with it. I'm going to use FreeBSD. I think on point #1 if
these folks find themselves in the position where they are looking at
low level stuff on this box, then the learning curve is going to be the same
whether it's linux or FreeBSD. That is, they can get around a UNIX
compatible system just fine, but don't know the low-level stuff. Besides,
the FreeBSD community provides unparalleled support and if you're gonna
have a problem with a community supported OS, it might as well be that
the community is really supportive of. On point #2 I think I'm
being premature on the worrying, but at the same time, I have to be
accountable for the decision if we run into problems with expanding.
Conveniently, I happen to have the FreeBSD 5.4 disks in my briefcase/bag
thingy. It's like a sign...
Hope this helps, will enjoy your gathered feedback...plz do post it!
I will.
If anyone thinks I'm making a terrible mistake, I'd appreciate the
criticism...
Thanks,
Rich.
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