Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:23:17 -0400 From: "Michael Conlen" <meconlen@obfuscated.net> To: "'Alain Fauconnet'" <alain@ait.ac.th>, "'Jason Stone'" <freebsd-performance@dfmm.org> Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: RE: tweaking FreeBSD for Squid using Message-ID: <000a01c30423$bd0f2a40$2b038c0a@corp.neutelligent.com> In-Reply-To: <20030416024844.GC7867@ait.ac.th>
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A lot of what you face doing a Squid server is backplane and other bus issues, though it's dependant on what you call "high performance" A pair of Sun E220R's (2 SPARC II processors) for example handled 1 million requests a day on a pair of mirrored 72 GB drives each. (Granted they were very nice 72GB drives). The thing about the Sun boxes was that they could get information out of memory really really fast, and the NIC cards could work to their full potential. Every device that did IO was on it's own PCI bus. It used to be that IDE drives took more processing power from the host to perform it's operations, where as SCSI does not. If that's still true I'd use that as a reason to stay away from IDE. The other advantage of SCSI, if you need great disk IO, is that you can have a lot of spindles. On a large SCSI system in a Sun for example I can get a single drive array to look like one SCSI device (with 14 disks in it) and put a lot of arrays on a channel. If I buy small, fast SCSI disks I can take full advantage of the 160 MB/sec array, where as I've seen a big fast IDE disk push no more than 10 MB/sec. The arrays can do RAID before it gets to the controller card, so you don't need the RAID in the box at all. Speaking of which, does anyone know of SCSI disk arrays with hardware RAID that work with FreeBSD? I've moved out of the Sun world and in to the FreeBSD world professionally and have no idea what's out there for PC hardware. -- Michael Conlen -----Original Message----- From: owner-freebsd-performance@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-performance@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Alain Fauconnet Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 10:49 PM To: Jason Stone Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: Re: tweaking FreeBSD for Squid using On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 07:31:24PM -0700, Jason Stone wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > > You didn't mention whether is it SCSI or IDE. > > Based on the fact that it's 15k rpms, I'm guessing scsi - do ide disks > faster than 7.2k rpms exist? I don't know. Seems that IDE disks evolve too fast for me nowadays. That's also why I was writing that I'm not even sure that the old stance "don't use IDE for servers" is still valid. OOTH, I've had a lot of trouble with busy IDE-based (ASUS P4* m/b) FreeBSD servers lately (hard hangs, see bug kern/44867). > > > > Don't do RAID. Bring up a filesystem on each disk (with soft updates > > of course), mount them "-o noatime" and configure Squid to use > > multiple cache dirs. > > Why is this preferrable to striping with raid-0? Well, because Squid does load balancing over multiple cache dirs quite well by itself, and (presumably) in a smarter way than just spreading raw disk blocks, so adding another layer of software for RAID-0 doesn't bring anything, and wastes CPU cycles. I'm not even sure that hardware RAID-0 is a good idea. According to my own experience (admittedly on a Linux box), removing software striping and using multiple cache dirs on physical volumes gave me a significant performance boost and lowered the load average of the server by about 30%. Since then, I've always stayed away from RAID on Squid boxes, whatever the O/S. Er. This is getting off topic maybe. I'll follow up privately if needed. _Alain_ _______________________________________________ freebsd-performance@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-performance To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-performance-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"help
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