On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Karl Denninger wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 10:54:37AM -0700, Doug wrote:
> > 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.
No argument there. My point was more in support of the people who
were demonstrating how other platforms are kicking our ass. Responding
with, "Yeah, but if you limit yourself to the specific case where freebsd
performs well, we rock!" doesn't cut it.
> > 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?
Started with 3.2-Stable, moved to -Current to get the latest and
greatest NFS fixes, the problem is that most of the fixes are for the
server, and my box is an amd/nfs client connecting to sun (almost all 2.6)
servers. I've posted rather voluminously on this topic to both -current
and -hackers over the past two weeks, but I've stopped doing that because
I have nothing new and I haven't gotten any responses in a while. I just
checked the archives and a search on those two lists for "heavily and
loaded and amd" brings up the threads. I'm actually building world right
now to get the latest NFS patch just in case it helps, but I'm not sure
how much longer we (my department) can justfiy the expense of me fiddling
around with this because we already know that the linux box works.
> > 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.
I'm not going to have that luxury, and I really believe that
NetApp and it's cousings are going to be THE point of access in the next
year or so. They work too well to pass up, and now that they are OEM'ing
the disk shelves they will be too cheap to justify rolling your own for
all but the most diehard platform advocates.
Doug
--
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only
nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter
what it does.
-- Will Rogers
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