Are fileservers a waste of money

[Larry Blair]

In article <550 at trlamct.oz> Paul writes:
=X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 261, message 5 of 16
=fileserver	Sun3/260	16M memory	xylogics 451
=						1 x fujitsu eagle
=						1 x fujitsu swallow

The 451 is slow junk.  Your problems with your server capacity are related
to the I/O bottleneck.  You can easily triple I/O throughput with a
caching controller.  Sun is selling the new SMD-4, which I haven't seen
yet.  I've used both the Interphase 4200 and the Ciprico 3220 and they
work great.  Be sure to do a tunefs -a 16 to get the full caching
advantage.  I have been absolutely amazed at how much capacity our 3/160
w/16mb have exhibited since we started to use the 4200's.

There are several other things that you can do to improve throughput.  Run
more nfsd's.  If you are running 4.0.1, get more memory.  If you are
running 3.X, increase the number of buffers.

=4. Providing local SCSI disks giving each client local swap space
=   (dataless client configuration)

This may be a good idea for the Lisp machines.  They may not run faster
after you fix your throughput problem, but they won't slow down the other
clients.

=Looking at the alternatives above we could spend money on a more powerful
=fileserver or a similar amount on additional memory and local disks for
=each client. For money spent which alternative gives the best performance
=improvement.

I would wait a few months and see what comes out on the market.  There are
several new companies working hard on high-performance, low cost
fileservers.

=I personally feel that a more powerful fileserver is still going to suffer
=a bottleneck at the disk with clients fighting for access to swap space,
=even if a new server provided twice the disk I/O speed compared to the
=existing server.

Right-o.  The new controllers will at least double your throughput.  I doubt
greatly if you are cpu bound.
-- 
Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb at vicom.com