Subject: performance once again...

From: David Fickes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 19:25:04 -0700

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.

regards, -d

-- 
David Fickes		                 +1 650 620-9905
ADVICE Press		                 +1 650 620-9906 fax
951 Old County Road # 103                [email-masked]
Belmont, CA 94002                        www.advicepress.com

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From: andrew morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 23:08:25 -0700 (PDT)

> 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