Might this be down to caching? Microsoft tune the fileserver to buffer requests in memory before committing to disk. It makes for fast network performance, but does leave you at risk of data loss if you had a power cut before the files were written.
Solaris is generally much more careful, and I think it only reports to clients that data is stored once it's actually on the disk. I'm not 100% sure this applies to CIFS, but with NFS you can get a massive increase in performance by adding a slog device to your pool. Ross On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:40 AM, Victor Hooi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > heya, > > I have a IBM x3650 server, Dual Quad-Core Xeon's, with 15K SAS disks, running > VMWare ESX 3.5. One virtual machine is a Windows 2008 Server, with 2.0 Gb of > RAM allocated, and another is a OpenSolaris 2008.11 (currently RC2) server, > also with 2.0 Gb of RAM allocated. > > The osol box is acting as a file-server, with ZFS/CIFS, running in domain > mode. > > This isn't very empirical, but I've noticed that the performance of the osol > network shares seems awfully slow. When just moving files around onto the > osol network share, I've noticed the write-speed in the Windows copy dialog > is often around 6-11 Mbps, sometimes going up to 20 Mbps. > > Copying files onto the local harddisk on the Windows 2008 server seems to get > speeds around 50 - 75 MBps (in the copy dialog). > > Even copying a file to a share on another file-server (running Windows 2003, > in workgroup mode), on an old Dell SC430 server with cheap SATA disks, > performance is also around 40 Mbps. > > I did a quick test using FC-copy > (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/fc-test.html), a simple app > that simply times how long it takes to write dummy files. > > Writing three ISO files (with sizes 448Mb, 526Mb, and 712 Mb) took > - 30.266 seconds to the local drive on the Windows 2008 server > - 76.5 seconds to the Solaris fileshare > - 31.219 seconds copying to the old Dell SC430 server. > > Now, I know that osol-2008.11 isn't production ready, but these performance > numbers seem really down. From memory, file writes did seem a *little* faster > (around 30MBps) under an older 2008.11 build (97, I think), but even then, > were quite slow. Should there be such a huge discrepancy between local writes > on the Windows 2008 server, and writes to the osol file share? (Considering > they're both running on the same physical machine) > > Is there something that I'm mis-configuring on this side, or is this the > performance I should be expecting? > > Cheers, > Victor > > PS: As a side-note, there's another issue we're having with another app which > may not be Solaris-related. > > Basically, it's an application called Handitax, a small Australian tax > package (I doubt anybody here's heard of it...lol), which we're running off > the osol file server. Currently, it seems to be acting up (it says it can't > find its transmission reports), which I'm not sure if it's caused by a > permission issue. > > Previously, it was running on the file share on the Dell SC430 server with > Windows 2003, in workgroup mode. It is now being served by the osol box in > domain mode. Not sure if there's some fiddling I need to do with the osol > box, but is there a definite way to find out if it's a permission thing, or > if the program just doesn't seem to like Solaris? (I suppose I could setup > another box in workgroup mode? Or is there a way to switch between the two?) > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > cifs-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/cifs-discuss > _______________________________________________ cifs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/cifs-discuss
