Benjamin Franz wrote:
On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Stewart Williams wrote:
Hi,
I am looking for a bit of advice on performance issues serving files
with my FC4 samba server.
The specs of my server are: 2.8ghz cpu, 1gb mem, IDE udma 100 (raid
mirror), 100Mbit NIC & Network.
I am serving 4 users and and a few gigabytes of data, which includes:
A 300mb QuickBooks file (in constant use)
2 users' Outlook .pst file @ about 1gb each (in constant use)
2 users' Outlook Express files at about 1gb each (in constant use)
Various files including some photoshop files @ around 40-50mb each
When all 4 users are working, the file access performance reduces
dramatically, and is very slow.
The probable bottlenecks given your specs:
1) 100 mbit ethernet is probably too slow. A *saturated* 100 mbit
connection is only going to move 10-12 megabytes of data per second.
Go to gigabit.
2) Disk I/O. If you want to get performance from the disks, use RAID10
with at least 6 disks (and a couple of extra controller cards capable
of 133Mhz operation to get you down to 1 bus per physical drive or
alternatively a 3ware board). Or carve up multiple disks so that your
Quickbooks file is one physical disk array, your Outlook files are on
a different disk array and your 'various' files are on a third disk
array (again making sure you keep to the 'one drive, one bus' rule).
3) Disk cache. Add more memory. Try to get at least 2 Gigabytes of RAM
installed. It can help hide many sins of disk performance.
4) Make sure you have everyone connected via an ethernet *switch*, not
a *hub*.
What I am asking for is a bit of advice as to whether I am try to
serve to much data from the one PC.
You can probably handle that load - as long as you eliminate the
bottlenecks.
Also is there anyway to monitor or find statistics of the amount of
data being served or the performance of the network card?
sar -n DEV
Thanks for the advice Benjamin,
The network is running on a 10/100Mbit switch, with all NIC's running at
100Mbps full duplex.
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