Thursday, September 14, 2006

Testing completed

And now I enter the data-analysis phase. It'll be a while until I release numbers.

But, I figured I'd give some impressions I got from the tests. For brevity purposes, when I say NetWare I mean, "OES NetWare 6.5 SP3 with patches up to 8/23/06", and when I say Linux, I mean, "OES Linux SP2, with patches up to 9/1/06". Also, when talking about I/O, I'm referring to, "I/O performed over the network via NCP to an NSS volume."
  • I/O on Linux is more CPU bound than on NetWare. For absolute sure, dir-create and file-create are much more expensive operations CPU-wise. They both perform similarly when done with unloaded systems, but the system hit for create on Linux is much higher than on NetWare. This could be due to System/User memory barriers, but my testing isn't robust enough to test that sort of thing. NetWare is all Ring 0, where by necessity Novell has brought a lot of the file-sharing functions in Linux into Ring 3.
  • Bulk I/O speed is similar. When talking about bulk I/O functions, in my case this was the IOZONE test, both platforms perform similarly. Unfortunately, caching played a big role on the NetWare test and didn't perform any role in the Linux test. This is the inverse of my findings in January. The testing gods frowned on me.
  • Linux seems to support faster network I/O than NetWare. Unfortunately, this may just be a side-effect of the caching. But network loads were higher when running the bulk IO tests on Linux than they were with NetWare. This can be a good thing (Linux supports more network I/O than NetWare) or a bad thing (Linux requires more network I/O for similar performance). Not sure at this time which it is.
CPU loads on the WUF cluster nodes during term generally run on average in the 8-12% range. The multiplier for CPU load was similar for dir-create and file-create operations, if you assume (incorrectly) that the CPU is reflective of file I/O activity Linux machines performing the same duties would report load-averages around 8.0. Since most I/O are reads, and that operation is not as load-inducing as a create, the averages would be under 100% (load-average of 2.0 for these boxes). But still higher than for NetWare.

Another thing to note is that the bulk IO test with IOZONE also induced very high load-averages on Linux, but the apparent throughput was very comparable to NetWare. IOZONE works by creating a file of size X and runs a series of tests on records of size Y. Unlike the dir-create and file-create tests, this test doesn't test how fast you can create files it tests how fast you can get data. Clearly record I/O within files still induces CPU load in the form of NDSD activity; however, unlike the dir-create and file-create tests the apparent throughput is not nearly as affected by high-CPU conditions.

From this early stage it looks like we could convert WUF to Linux and still not need new hardware. But we'd be running that hardware harder, much harder, than it would have run under NetWare. Since we're not pushing the envelope with our NetWare servers now, we have the room to move. If our servers were running closer to 20% CPU, the answer would be quite different.

As I read the documentation, it looks like NCPserv is a function of ndsd. Therefore, seeing ndsd taking up CPU cycles that way was due to NCP operations, not DS operations. If that's the case, substituting a reiser partition for the NSS partition would decrease CPU loading some, but probably not the order of magnitude it needs.

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