Subject: Re2: performance once again...
From: Dave Ritter (dave.ritter@newtimes.com)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 15:03:35 EDT
the network card you are using should be fine, I use 3Com cards if I really
need speed. (stay away from intel cards, they don't work very well with
appletalk)
on a server I set up last summer, much like yours, I was having some speed
problems so I put a cheap scsi card in the PC and put in a junk 2gig scsi
hard drive. The speed difference to and from the server was very noticeable.
this was in a newspaper workflow.
in my experience, a switch is almost always better if you are looking for
speed...
have you tested the through put from the macs with any software?
I use "LanTest-2.5.2" it's free... :)
I can email it to you if you like
Dave
> From: David Fickes <david@advicepress.com>
> Reply-To: David Fickes <david@advicepress.com>
> Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 11:41:03 -0700
> To: "Dave Ritter" <Dave.Ritter@newtimes.com>
> Subject: Re: performance once again...
>
> The cards in the PC are Netgear PCI 10/100 and the hub is an 8 port
> Netgear 10/100. I don't know if it matters but there is ONE 10 Mbs
> connection on the hub but it is an older Unix system that isn't
> relevant to the file sharing.
>
> -d
>
>
>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>
> --
> David Fickes +1 650 620-9905
> ADVICE Press +1 650 620-9906 fax
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>
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