On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 10:54:37AM -0700, Doug wrote: > We're adding some machines at work for (essentially) cgi > processing only. It was never considered to use anything less than 2 cpu > boxes, and the current round of testing is going so well that we're > seriously considering 4 cpu boxes because they are not that much more > expensive and our processing is highly CPU bound. I agree that redundancy > is a good thing, but at some point the increased network latency exceends > the point of diminishing returns for the redundancy factor. > > In short, increasing SMP efficiency should really be a priority > for N>2 systems.
Agreed. But this is a BIG job, because to do that you have to solve the "one big kernel lock" problem and go to fine-grained locking. This is a non-trivial job. > > I had an NT machine that ran file and print service for my office (before > > I sold the company). I replaced it with SAMBA on the same hardware. > > > > Performance more than doubled, and the ONLY thing that I changed was the > > operating system. > ..... > However notice I said, "when my box is running." So > far it's fallen down on NFS issues so many times that it's currently > sidelined. What release are you running? There ARE NFS issues - most of which can be solved. I had to do this all the time running an ISP with a home-grown cluster system that did exactly that - all "real" data was sitting on a couple of big RAID arrays - and served via NFS. > Now if we were talking about a uni-processor system doing nothing > but serving web pages from local disk, I know I'd be kicking some serious > ass, but that model isn't the real world anymore. Especially as Network > Appliance boxes become more and more common (and they will be, fast and > furious) multi-processor and NFS are for all practical purposes already > the reality now, and will only be more so in the future. That's the world I lived in (except that I used FreeBSD for the NFS servers as well!) and done properly it works EXTREMELY well. -- -- Karl Denninger (k...@denninger.net) Web: fathers.denninger.net I ain't even *authorized* to speak for anyone other than myself, so give up now on trying to associate my words with any particular organization. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
