I just worked out a REALLY NEAT trick to help with managing my benchmarking clients. I figured something like this is possible, but actually seeing it work was one of those moments that make what I do so fun. I came real close to shouting, "I am the zombie master," but I held off. Just.
Anyway, the trick:
The jobs all seem to start within 30 seconds of the scheduled time. This doesn't seem to be due to differences in the workstation clocks, on checking those are all within 3 seconds of 'true', rather the Workstation Manager task polling interval. I wish I could get true 'everyone right now' performance, but that's not possible without w-a-y more minions.
On the 'large number of sub-directories' test, the early jumpers seemed to get a continued edge over their late starters. The time to create directories for the early jumpers was consistantly in the 3-5ms range, where the late jumpers were in the 10-13ms range. Significant difference there. And some started fast and became slow, so there is clearly some threshold involved here beyond just the server dealing with all those new directory entries. CPU load on the NetWare box (what I have staged up first) during the test with 32 clients creating and enumerating large directories was in the 55-70% range. That load is spread equally over both CPUs, so those bits of NSS are fully MP enabled.
Tags: benchmarking, zenworks
Anyway, the trick:
- Make sure all the clients are imported as Workstation Objects.
- Create a Workstation Group, and add all of the clients into it.
- Add the newly created Workstation Group as a R/W trustee of the volume I'm benchmarking against. This allows the workstations as themselves, not users, to write files.
- Create a Workstation Policy, associate it to the group.
- In the Workstation Policy, create a Scheduled Task. Point it at the batchfile I wrote that'll map a drive to the correct volume, run the tests, and clean up.
- Modify the schedule so it'll run at a specific time, making sure to uncheck the 'randomize' box.
- Force a refresh of the Policies on the clients (restarting the Workstation Manager service will do it).
The jobs all seem to start within 30 seconds of the scheduled time. This doesn't seem to be due to differences in the workstation clocks, on checking those are all within 3 seconds of 'true', rather the Workstation Manager task polling interval. I wish I could get true 'everyone right now' performance, but that's not possible without w-a-y more minions.
On the 'large number of sub-directories' test, the early jumpers seemed to get a continued edge over their late starters. The time to create directories for the early jumpers was consistantly in the 3-5ms range, where the late jumpers were in the 10-13ms range. Significant difference there. And some started fast and became slow, so there is clearly some threshold involved here beyond just the server dealing with all those new directory entries. CPU load on the NetWare box (what I have staged up first) during the test with 32 clients creating and enumerating large directories was in the 55-70% range. That load is spread equally over both CPUs, so those bits of NSS are fully MP enabled.
Tags: benchmarking, zenworks