Hi all!

What is the speed that can be expected of openafs, when writing some (perhaps 
10-100) largish (perhaps 10-100 MB) files or a single 4GB file to an afs 
volume?

The background for the question is a desire to move from using NFS for HPC 
data to AFS; over the lab 100Mbps network the speeds are the same, limited to 
abour 10MBps by the network; no problem there. But when writing to the afs 
volume or NFS mount from the same host which is running the fileserver and 
NFS server processes, things get nasty: I can write ~80MBps to the NFS share 
(it being effectively local disc now), but AFS speed stays at 10MBps. I 
cannot seem to figure out why.

I've tried the different cache manager startup options, fs 
storebehind -allfiles 2000000 and various speed-measuring tools: bonnie, 
iozone and dd if=/dev/zero of=file_on_afs count=something bs=something. 
Nothing seems to give more than 15 MBps from fileserver host to its own 
volume. There is no significant network traffic meanwhile, i.e. contacting 
the volume location servers etc is not the issue.

How can I speed things up? This is rather annoying (and will prevent replacing 
NFS with OpenAFS), since the volumes in question get huge bursts of incoming 
data (over a 1Gbps link), which should be written to disc rather fast; 
preferably at speeds where either the 1 Gbps link or the disc speed is the 
limiting factor. Now, the limit is somewhere else and I cannot tell, where.

Another question, which is just a curiosity: if I try to set storebehind 
larger than about 2 gigabytes, fs says:

# fs st -allfiles 4000000 -v
fs: 4000000 must be 0 or a positive number.

Obviously, 4000000 is positive and the system is 64-bit so, there should be no 
problems with 32bit integers either - unless openafs has.

Cheers,
Juha

-- 
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                | Juha Jäykkä, [email protected]                    |
                | Laboratory of Theoretical Physics             |
                | Department of Physics, University of Turku    |
                | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/              |
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