I have just built an opensolaris box (2008.11) as a small fileserver (6x 1TB drives as RAIDZ2, kernel CIFS) for home media use and I am noticing an odd behavior copying files to the box.
My knowledge of monitoring/analysis tools under Solaris is very limited, and so far I have just been using the System Monitor that pops up with ctrl-alt-del, and the numbers I am reporting come from that. When copying files (a small number of large files from a Mac to the Solaris/CIFS server) I initially see network usage of 40-45 MB/s which is pretty much what I would expect from single spindle disks over GigE through a SoHo switch that does not support jumbo frames. However, I only see this performance for perhaps 10 seconds, then it drops to 25-30 MB/s for about 15-20 seconds, and then it drops again to 17-20 MB/s where it remains for the duration of file transfer. This is not an occasional issue, it happens this way each and every time. At each of the three levels, the speeds are consistent. There is a brief period of inactivity (0.5 s) when the speeds are reduced, leading me to believe that *something* is throttling speeds back. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Any idea where it might be coming from, and what I could do to keep a sustained 40-45 MB/s transfer rate? Any suggestions as to what tools I might use to help diagnose this would be appreciated. At the moment, I am in the process of putting an old Windows box together to see if I can replicate the problem and eliminate the possibility of a cause outside of the Solaris box. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
