File server performance
Hi,
I've just finished building a new file server that has an Adaptec 2400a RAID
controller card, to which 4x250GB IDE drives are connected. The card is right
now running in hardware RAID-5 mode and I'm using the Linux I2O driver with
kernel 2.6.14 (vanilla sources). The server is running debian sarge.
Using bonnie I get around 17MB/sec write performance and 30MB/sec read
performance, which I guess is not too bad for a card like this. I'm wondering
however if I could do better by configuring the card on JBOD mode and running
software RAID-5 instead. The machine will mainly be used as a file server (for
1 user, me...). It's also mail server, dns server, web server etc etc but
still very light usage. I might also be running some applications on it, like
bittorrent for example. The CPU is a 3GHz pentium4 on a Gigabyte GA-4MXSV
motherboard.
Before I decide to just optimize the raw throughput by going to SW RAID-5 I'd
like to measure real world NFS performance (and maybe Samba performance as
well) to see how the machine behaves under NFS load. I don't want every CPU
cycle consumed under heavy NFS load by software RAID since the machine needs
to be able to do other things as well. Could anyone recommend a good testsuite
to get some good IOPS numbers for example? Is runnoing bonnie over NFS the
best thing? I will be connecting from a debian testing machine to execute the
tests.
Thanks
Daniel
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