Subject: File Copy Performance tweak needed (wanted)

From: Chip Mefford <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 17:58:39 -0400

Linux RH 6.1 intel.

netatalk 1.4b2+asun2.1.3

When copying any file of any significant size to the netatalk
server, the copy will begin on the mac, proceed, then pause for
a time, then either finish, or procced and pause again, then
finish. 

Just from watching the file server, during the actuall copy, there
is pretty much no disk activity, then during the pause, the 
disk gets real busy, then during the next phase of the copy
the activity drops until the next pause, then the disk gets
busy and so on. 

I was wondering if there was some kind of buffering going on
that I can have some control over. 

I am lost, 

Any help is appreciated,
thanx

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From: andrew morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 15:33:11 -0700 (PDT)

> that I can have some control over. 

I doubt netatalk or linux are buffering that much data or that they would
cause this kind of problem.  Do you have a caching SCSI or RAID
controller?  We see something similar to this behavior, although it is not
very pronounced, with large writes to our RAID 5 array.  Whenever it
decides it has to write out all the changes and calculate the parity,
there is a pause for a few seconds.  Setting you cache to write-back
instead of write-through can help, but make sure you are aware of the
consequences.

	Andy

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From: Chip Mefford <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 19:23:26 -0400

>controller?  
>snip<

Hi Andy, 
No, no raid or caching controller. 

Just a regular ole hard drive. 

This strikes me as odd because my ASIP box doesn't do this. Sometimes the
pauses can be a pretty pronounced. 

I am connecting to the netatalk server via TCP.

thanx for the clues so far.

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From: Patrik Schindler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 14:04:27 +0200

>a time, then either finish, or procced and pause again, then

Netatalk looks in the dosktop database for a matching icon and adds this, I think.
Use a faster (probably SCSI) disk :-)

:wq! PoC

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From: Patrik Schindler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 14:06:01 +0200

>pauses can be a pretty pronounced. 

Perhaps ASIP won't use write-buffering at all.

:wq! PoC