Performance (and other) problems

[Rob Naccarato]

On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, David Collier-Brown wrote:

> You wrote:
> | Over the last summer we took our home dir / applications servers for
> the
> | 330 Win95 PCs that they service and attempted to replace them with a
> | single AlphaServer 8200 (Digital Unix (OSF/1), Samba, 4GB RAM,
> 2x525Mhz cpus).
> | The results were *not* good
> 
> 	I can help, a bit:  I have a small performance model I use
> 	for sizing, and can make a back-of-envelope estimate based
> 	on
> 		cpu type and number
> 		bus type
> 		number of ethernets and speed
> 		number of scsi controllers
> 		number of disks on each of the above controllers.
> 
> 	Can you send me (and others who want to help) that sort of info?
> 	It's genuinely unusual that Samba is bottlenecking on cpu:
> 	most people have far more than they do disk bandwidth
> 
> 	I promise to report back to the group.
> 

CPU type: EV56 (21164A) (2 of them, running at 625Mhz, I was incorrect
above)
Bus Type: PCI, SCSI subsystem is FW (2 HSZ70's into an ESA10000)
Ethernets: 5 cards (4 at 100Mbps Full Duplex, 1 at 10Mps Half Duplex)
SCSI Controllers: 1 (for the HSZ70), 1 for a CDROM tower, 1 for System
Disc and swap.
# of discs:
	On the ESA10000, we house 24 9GB drives set up in 3 RAID5 sets,
	there are 3 discs in a "failover set".

	6 CDROM drives on it's own SCSI bus.

	The System disc is 4GB, swap is split across 3 2GB discs on the
	same bus.
	

Hope this helps.

Rob Naccarato           "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages
Sys Admin               because they know they can be impolite without
Sheridan College        having their skulls split, as a general thing."
Oakville, Ont. Canada                      - Robert E. Howard