Samba Load Testing at Brunel University

[David Collier-Brown]

Peter Polkinghorne wrote: 
> Software: Solaris 2.5.1 and Samba 1.9.18p10

> The load on cedar did increase - the memory was not really adequate for the
> number of Samba processes - Swap space had to be raised to 460Mb.
> SAR indicated that the idle time went down to less than 20% for busy periods
> at peak test as opposed to 60% for normal load.

> More memory would have helped cedar or may be we were hitting other barriers?

	There is an algorithm change in Solaris which will help
	fileservers to conserve memory: priority paging.  See
	http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/priority_paging.html
	
	This is also available on 2.6 and 2.5.1 as a patch: it causes
	the system to start paging a bit earlier, and to page out & free
	only i/o pages (ones that are being used as filesystem cache).
	This is a great advantage on fileservers, as it causes recently-
	written data to be flushed to disk quickly and the pages made
	available for reuse (including update), as well as getting the 
	data safely to disk faster.

	

	Peter: I'll send you my new Solaris tuning paper in
	the next massage

	Everyone else: would a Solaris tuning paper be of interest
	to the group?  If so, send mail.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | and astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | http://java.science.yorku.ca/~davecb
Work: (905) 477-0437 Home: (416) 223-8968 Email: davecb at canada.sun.com