On 03/11/11 07:59 AM, Robert Milkowski wrote:
...
3. pkg performance
The solaris.zlib downloads at about 100MB/s on a GbE network - good.
However then pkg starts downloading packages and the network utilizations
varies between 0.5MB - 30MBs with an average less than a couple of MB/s.
I guess the sporadic 15-30MB/s occurrences are for some large files,
otherwise
the performance is abysmal and it takes far too long to just transfer
packages.
Not to mention that entire process is basically serialized and doesn't make
much use of additional cores on a server. Is there a way for pkg to
download
multiple files at the same time? This could probably help a little bit...
It doesn't have to be able to saturate a GbE link but doing less than 5%
is far
from being impressive.
Actually, pkg(1) makes 20 connections to a package server at a time for
content, so it's only "serial" in the sense that one package is
retrieved at a time.
However, pkg retrieves individual files for a package, not a giant blob.
This does mean that transfer time may be slower than if entire
packages were transferred at a time, but it greatly minimises the amount
of bytes transferred because of variants, facets, and updates (since
only the files that are changed are transferred for updates).
Another thing to consider is that if you are using pkg.depotd and want
better scalability or performance, you could export the repository via
an NFS share instead, or place an Apache reverse caching proxy in front
of pkg.depotd.
As for use of additional cores, it wouldn't help much. pkg(1)
operations are mostly I/O bound, so multi-threading wouldn't help much
(ignoring Python's limitations there thanks to the global interpreter lock).
4. packages install/uninstall sections
In jumpstart if some packages were marked to be uninstalled there would
never
be installed in the first place. Currently AI+pkg installs all selected
packages and then uninstalls packages marked so. Ideally all packages to be
installed and uninstalled should be passed to pkg at the same time and pkg
should come up with the final set of packages to install.
Indeed, the installer can do this using the '--reject' option to the pkg
install subcommand, or the plan_install() reject_list if using the
pkg.client.api.ImageInterface.
...
6. /export/home
How can I prevent it from being created? I don't want to use autofs for
/home directories, nor I want to /export, /export/home, /export/home/jack to be
created. Unconfiguring it during the first boot via smf is rather silly.
You're really better off adapting to autofs. It is the expected
standard for home directory management in Solaris. With that said, if
you want to use it locally first comment out /home in /etc/auto_master
and then restart the automounter ("svcadm restart autofs").
I'm not certain how you would customise that with the current installer.
-Shawn
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