NSS read-ahead

One of the tuning items that has come up as I've been doing all of this benchmarking is NSS Read Ahead. This can be configured by two command-line parameters:

nss /AllocAheadBlks=[vol]:[count]
nss /ReadAheadBlks=[vol]:[count]

AllocAhead allocates blocks on writes, where ReadAhead is just that, blocks read ahead of the read. Both behaviors are to make access to the base I/O subsystem more efficient and to improve Read performance.

By default as of NetWare 6.5, the default ReadAhead is 2 blocks (8KB), and the default AllocAhead is 15 blocks (60KB).

So what is the recommended settings for these? The manual has this to say:

The most efficient value for block count depends on your hardware. In general, we recommend a block count of 8 to 16 blocks for large data reads; 2 blocks for CDs, 8 blocks for DVDs, and 2 blocks for ZLSS.

ZLSS is, I believe, a standard volume.

The question then begs what is the real optimal setting for this, based on what you can find out about your storage systems. I don't know, but I do have some suggestive ideas. If I have time, I'll see what I can do about testing it.

The gold standard is having very good data on how I/O is performed on your volume. For a volume consisting of mostly databases, such as Access files, the read-ahead should be set to a value close to the average record-read size. For a plain ole home-directory volume file size is probably the better determiner of 'best'.

Running some stats on the STU1 volume, I've found the following:

RAID Stripe size: 128KB
NSS Block size: 4KB
Median Size: 8192KB
Average Size: 293KB
File-count Median Size: 16KB

• 50% of the files on STU1 are 16K or smaller
• 50% of the files on STU1 are responsible for 0.55% of the total space used on STU1
• 90% of the files on STU1 are 256K or smaller, which represents 7.9% of the total space used on STU1
• 10% of the files on STU1 are responsible for over 90% of the data on STU1

Based on this, a ReadAhead value of "4" is probably in order. This represents a file size of 16K, which 50% of the files on the volume exceed. A ReadAhead value of 32 (128K) would match the RAID stripe size and would very likely enhance, possibly greatly, reads of those files that exceed 128K in length.

The GIS volume is another story.

Median Size: 200MB
Average Size: 11.5MB
File-count Median Size: 8KB

• Total files on the volume is vastly smaller than on STU1
• 43% of the data on the GIS volume are in files larger than 256MB
• The largest file-type is TIF, which is an uncompressed graphics format that is read as a whole, not as sub-records
• Files under 64MB in size represent 93% of the files, but only 7.7% of the data. Compare that with 99.97% and 89.3% respectively on STU1

In this case a ReadAhead setting of much higher is called for. The Novell guidance of "16" makes sense in this case, since that is 1/2 the stripe size and most of the reads on the volume are probably going to take advantage of this activity.

Tags: OES, NSS