dbench scalability testing

[Andrew M. Theurer]

> >   If you want more info on the OSDL, please see www.osdlab.org - we have 4 &
> >   8 and (soon to be available) 16 processor boxes for use by the open source
> >   community.
> 
> Excellent, I've been doing samba/linux performance work but at this point
> I only have a quad cpu machine. Can your network cards do zero copy? I
> have a few samba patches including making samba use sendfile which could
> help when you get around to doing netbench runs.

Anton, Nathan,

I am also doing linux/samba/scalability measurment/improvement for IBM
LTC, and would be interested in sharing ideas, results, etc. My goal is
this: measure linux 2.4 scalability now, prod, peek, & poke at what's
going on (mostly focused in the kernel), work/improve on the slow stuff,
hopefully improve scalability.  

We are currently using a Netfinity 8-way, 700Mhz, 1MB L2, 8.5 GB RAM,
8x100 Mbit Enet.  Netbench is currently the target benchmark, but I want
to move my work over to smbtorture soon.  We are using eepro100 cards,
not sure if those support zero copy (I have not checked), and we will
probably move to 4x1 Gbps intel-1000 cards.  Right now I am in the
process of getting some baseline numbers for UP, 1P, 2P, 4P, & 8P.  Are
biggest problem so far has been getting enough clients to drive the
test.  We only have 16 now, but hopefully soon we will have 64 clients. 
I have some ideas about modifying smbtorture to support multiple clients
to one server to help drive to workload.  Let me know if you want to
collaborate on some of this stuff.

Regards,

Andrew Theurer
IBM LTC