Subject: Re: performance once again...
From: Dave Ritter (dave.ritter@newtimes.com)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 13:37:51 EDT
what type of network are you using (cards, speed, hubs or switches)?
> From: andrew morgan <morgan@orst.edu>
> Reply-To: andrew morgan <morgan@orst.edu>
> Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 02:14:31 -0700
> To: David Fickes <david@advicepress.com>
> Cc: netatalk-admins@umich.edu
> Bcc: "Dave Ritter" <Dave.Ritter@newtimes.com>
> Subject: Re: performance once again...
>
>
>
> On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, David Fickes wrote:
>
>> I've seen a few messages regarding this but none seems to answer
>> my couple of questions definitively. I'm interested in gauging
>> netatalk performance in the following environment.
>>
>> I'm running netatalk-asun on a FreeBSD 4.0 system. The clients
>> are a mix of MacOS9 (iMac 350s) and a G4/450.
>>
>> The software where we need the performance is MYOB which shares
>> the datafile and does lookups when requestings lists of data
>> such as customers and such.
>>
>> MYOB has two options for network access: TCP/IP and Appletalk
>>
>> The server is currently an AMD K62 / 350 with minimal RAM at this
>> time. The drive is a new ATA66.
>>
>> Client access on the netatalk server seems to be better than from the
>> iMac but not by much of course having the datafile on your local machine
>> is MUCH better.
>>
>> I'm wondering where the bottlenecks are in the system.
>> Options are:
>>
>> RAM (currently 64 MB)
>> Faster disk drive (I have a spare U2W drive and card)
>> Faster CPU?
>>
>> I'm interested in any suggestions.
>
> On your server, try running top, vmstat, or iostat to see what is
> happening. In top, look at the information at the top of the screen to
> see if you are spending most of your time in 'iowait' or 'kernel' or
> 'system' (whichever is appropriate for your top).
>
> Also look at your free memory and swap used readings. If your swap used
> is too high (maybe 50% of your total physical memory -- 32MB), you may
> want more memory, and that may also affect the amount of time your system
> spends in 'iowait' if it is actively swapping.
>
> Rarely is a file server cpu-bound.
>
> Probably, you don't have a fast enough disk array. If you are using a
> single disk drive, you probably won't get more than 4-5MB per second out
> of it (sustained). You'll need some form of disk striping (RAID 0 or 5 or
> LVM) to really get the most IO performance.
>
> I'm not familiar with MYOB, so I don't know what kinds of accesses you
> need to support. Small, random IO? Large blocks of data? Does this act
> like a database server or a file server?
>
> Hope this helps...
>
> Andy
>
>
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