differences bloom

I got the OES-Linux SP2 server formatted and installed this morning. And the NSS volume created. I ran the first benchmark, and golly there is a difference.

Test 1 is the 'big directory' test. The client stations create 20,000 sub directories in a sub-directory titled the name of the machine. The time to create each directory is tracked, and the time it takes to enumerate each directory is also tracked. In testing out the benchmark it is clear that mkdir is a more expensive operation than 'touch' is in the make-file test (also 20,000 files).

On NetWare with 30 client machines pounding the server, CPU rose to about 80% or so and stayed there. Load on the CPUs were equal. There was some form of bottlenecking going on because some clients finished much faster than others, and it isn't clear what separated the two classes.

On Linux the load-average is pretty stable around 18. The process taking up that CPU is ndsd. The numbers I'm getting back from the clients are vastly worse than NetWare. The first time I ran it I figured that this was due to the workstation objects not having the posixAccount extension. So I fixed that, and now the percentages are better, but still much worse than NetWare. I'll run this test again with only 10 clients, so I get to compare smaller concurrent access numbers.

That kind of load is not exactly 'real user load', it's a synthetic load designed to show how well either platform handles abuse. The iozone benchmark should be closer to comparable since that's just a single file, and ndsd shouldn't be involved with those accesses much at all. That'll be almost entirely i/o subsystem.

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