Hello. We're running a number of time sharing machines with SunOS4
and AFS 3.4a.patches (build 5.28 + Transarc fix). We're trying to stuff
about 70-90 users on each machine. Our initial intention was to put as
little software as possible on each machine and put most of it out on AFS.
We figured we would put huge caches on the machines (we picked 700MB) with
the thought that the commonly used programs would land in cache and stay
there to be accessed from local disk. What we're finding, however, is that
the load averages are high, response is sluggish, and the number of users
is down from 70 to 40.
We're running 2 of our three machines with local software packs and
the third with an AFS based software pack. The third machine is
consistently slower than the others, though it has the most memory and
equal CPU to the others, but this is a pain because it requires more work
to keep the machines with local disk up to date.
Does anyone know what might be causing our performance problem? Would
we be better reducing our cache size and relying more on the network due to
the flat nature of the cache directory structure? Is there some cache
manager tuning we could do to spiff up response? Would a memory based
cache be the way to go? Is there an optimum cache size which gives best
performance?
Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
-Brian
