From owner-freebsd-performance@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Apr 16 07:52:15 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B131637B401 for ; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 07:52:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sabre.velocet.net (sabre.velocet.net [216.138.209.205]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CDE2343FCB for ; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 07:52:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dgilbert@velocet.ca) Received: from trooper.velocet.ca (trooper.velocet.net [216.138.242.2]) by sabre.velocet.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id BB9D0138153; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:52:11 -0400 (EDT) Received: by trooper.velocet.ca (Postfix, from userid 66) id CAF2974D72; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:52:10 -0400 (EDT) Received: by canoe.velocet.net (Postfix, from userid 101) id 1788756791B; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:52:08 -0400 (EDT) From: David Gilbert MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16029.28184.11825.471228@canoe.velocet.net> Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:52:08 -0400 To: "Michael Conlen" In-Reply-To: <000a01c30423$bd0f2a40$2b038c0a@corp.neutelligent.com> References: <20030416024844.GC7867@ait.ac.th> <000a01c30423$bd0f2a40$2b038c0a@corp.neutelligent.com> X-Mailer: VM 7.07 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid cc: 'Jason Stone' cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org cc: 'Alain Fauconnet' Subject: RE: tweaking FreeBSD for Squid using X-BeenThere: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Performance/tuning List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 14:52:16 -0000 >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Conlen writes: Michael> A lot of what you face doing a Squid server is backplane and Michael> other bus issues, though it's dependant on what you call Michael> "high performance" Michael> A pair of Sun E220R's (2 SPARC II processors) for example Michael> handled 1 million requests a day on a pair of mirrored 72 GB Michael> drives each. (Granted they were very nice 72GB drives). The Michael> thing about the Sun boxes was that they could get information Michael> out of memory really really fast, and the NIC cards could Michael> work to their full potential. Every device that did IO was on Michael> it's own PCI bus. There are several orders of magnitude in difference between motherboards (even of the same chipset) for PCI performance. PCI seems to be a bus that can be implemented well ... or very, very poorly. If you're planning to serve up 100Mbit plus from a PC, test several good (ie: expensive) motherboards in a bakeoff. Motherboards change so often that I can't even give you recomendations ... you can't buy them anymore. Ironically, many of the best motherboards for performance have also been high DOA. The K7S5A, for instance, had a DOA rate of 50% for us (50% crashed on memory stress tests, etc), but the good ones culled from the litter are among the best boards we have in production. Michael> It used to be that IDE drives took more processing power from Michael> the host to perform it's operations, where as SCSI does Michael> not. If that's still true I'd use that as a reason to stay Michael> away from IDE. The real advantage of SCSI (for large request rates) is tagged command queueing. Many spindles + tagged queueing = fast. Michael> The other advantage of SCSI, if you need great disk IO, is Michael> that you can have a lot of spindles. On a large SCSI system Michael> in a Sun for example I can get a single drive array to look Michael> like one SCSI device (with 14 disks in it) and put a lot of Michael> arrays on a channel. If I buy small, fast SCSI disks I can Michael> take full advantage of the 160 MB/sec array, where as I've Michael> seen a big fast IDE disk push no more than 10 MB/sec. The Michael> arrays can do RAID before it gets to the controller card, so Michael> you don't need the RAID in the box at all. RAID isn't always a win with Squid. Michael> Speaking of which, does anyone know of SCSI disk arrays with Michael> hardware RAID that work with FreeBSD? Michael> I've moved out of the Sun world and in to the FreeBSD world Michael> professionally and have no idea what's out there for PC Michael> hardware. As I've said before, in the category of non-silly-expensive RAID, vinum is faster than any I've tested. that said, SCSI<-->SCSI raid systems should all work with FreeBSD. Look in the hardware release notes for PCI raid devices, but dis-recomend them. Dave. -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Velocet Communications. | Two things can only be | |Mail: dgilbert@velocet.net | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================