On Thu 05 Jun 2003 at 09:09:51, David Smith said: > current file server. My stress tests thus far have been very positive. > It's a 4-CPU (hyperthreaded) Xeon 2Ghz box with 15,000 RPM SCSI drives.
Hmm, I question the choice of hardware. Multiprocessing for an NFS box is either a) pointless or b) detrimental. Why? Because NFS isn't multithreaded. knfsd will primarily run on one processor, and if the kernel *does* switch it from one processor to another, you have to re-load the cache on the other processor with the knfsd code, which is a pretty big hit. For NFS, if the choice is between one hefty MP 8-rack-unit machine and 8 SP 1-rack-unit machines, the latter will be your better choice. Segment your file system, which will make Linux happier anyway. Sure, it's a few more lines in the automount configuration, but that's less of a headache than one slow NFS server. Now for multithreaded applications like samba, apache, or slapd, then MP machines are just fine because they're contiually forking new processes (or as it were, threads) for each connection. Thus, on an SP box, the CPU cache gets re-filled anyway. So you may as well split the load between a few different processors. Something I've come to believe over the last year is that a large cluster of small, one-use servers is a lot easier to manage than a small cluster of large, multi-use servers. There are still some applications where the reverse is true (like enterprise-size databases or some supercomputing applications), but your general internet services run much better when split between a handful of machines. The other advantage is that if one goes down, then it's trivial to just nuke it and copy a complete image over from a working server, rather than restoring everything from backup and bringing each subsystem back on line. -- Soren Harward [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
