On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 11:06:31AM -0400, Brian Stults (bs7452@csc.albany.edu) wrote: > Hello, > > I'm sorry that this is off-topic, but I think many people here would be > able to answer this question easily. The unix system in my research > center has a file server with 4 CPUs. I don't know all the specifics of > the machine, but my question is rather general anyway. Basically, the > file server is the fastest of all the Sun stations by far, so everyone > logs into it to run their jobs. Some of these jobs last for several > days and are very processor intensive. It "feels" to me like my I/O > intensive jobs slow down when these processor-intensive jobs are > running. However, our sysadmin insists that cpu-intensive jobs will > have no effect on I/O intensive jobs. Is this generally true? Under Solaris, 'top' includes data on CPUWait and IOWait statistics. I'd take a look at these numbers and see what they tell you. The other empirical solution is to run a comparative test of file transfers of files of a fixed size both disk-to-disk and disk-to-net, from the fileserver, at various times of day with varying system loads. Note that the disk-to-net values are highly dependent on network traffic, and will likely be slower during the day (when LAN usage is higher). A scheduling system or rationalization of compute resources may be appropriate for your environment. > Thanks very much for any information you can give me. I would like to > make the case that the file server should be just a file server and that > all these week-long jobs should be run somewhere else, but I just don't > know if that is a valid argument. If the jobs are impacting fileserver functionality, and that is the primary purpose of the box, then yes. If compute resources are unavailable elsewhere, and fileserver performance isn't effected, and financial resource allocation isn't an issue, there is no harm done. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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