Thanks for the tips. I'll check out Wireshark. A second question: how do you assess performance within the box itself? I'm using iostat -x, but there's also bonnie (which I've never used). If I want to figure out if the network is the limiting factor, I should also figure out the limiting hard-drive sustained bandwidth, right? What's the best way to do that?
There's no question that getting 80% of ethernet bandwidth at peak transfer rates is as good as it will get. However, I've noticed that when copying files and watching the network traffic, I see dips every ten seconds or so, where no data is being sent. This problem was a lot worse when I just had two mirrored drives, which I guess were not putting forward enough sustained bandwidth, even internally. So it's not clear to me that the disk subsystem is always saturating the ethernet connection. Of course, if there's a bigger pipe to accept higher peak bandwidth, then of course the average will increase, but I do want to make sure I'm getting the highest overall transfer that I can. Moreover, I want to make sure my current setup is at its optimum, also in part because I am going to get a new tape drive, and want to make sure my disk subsystem is enough to feed it at full rate (otherwise you get the annoying start / stop on the tape drive, which kills the performance and the motors). Any additional insight would be welcome. Thanks! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
