Adam: > Does anyone have a clue as to where the bottlenecks are going to be with > this: > > 16x hot swap SATAII hard drives (plus an internal boot drive) > Tyan S2895 (K8WE) motherboard > Dual GigE (integral nVidia ports) > 2x Areca 8-port PCIe (8-lane) RAID drivers > 2x AMD Opteron 275 CPUs (2.2GHz, dual core) > 8 GiB RAM
> The supplier is used to shipping Linux servers in this 3U chassis, but > hasn't dealt with Solaris. He originally suggested 2GiB RAM, but I hear > things about ZFS getting RAM hungry after a while. ZFS is opportunistic when it comes to using free memory for caching. I'm not sure what exactly you've heard. > I guess my questions are: > - Does anyone out there have a clue where the potential bottlenecks > might be? What's your workload? Bart is subscribed to this list, but he has a famous saying, "One experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions." Without knowing what you're trying to do with this box, it's going to be hard to offer any useful advice. However, you'll learn the most by getting one of these boxes and running your workload. If you have problems, Solaris has a lot of tools that we can use to diagnose the problem. Then we can improve the performance and everybody wins. > - If I focused on simple streaming IO, would giving the server less RAM > have an impact on performance? The more RAM you can give your box, the more of it ZFS will use for caching. If your workload doesn't benefit from caching, then the impact on performance won't be large. Could you be more specific about what the filesystem's consumers are doing when they're performing "simple streaming IO?" > - I had assumed four cores would be better than the two faster (3.0GHz) > single-core processors the vendor originally suggested. Agree? I suspect that this is correct. ZFS does many steps in its I/O path asynchronously and they execute in the context of different threads. Four cores are probably better than two. Of course experimentation could prove me wrong here, too. :) -j _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
