VMUNIX Blues

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Peter Tribble 03.03.05 / 9am

Your throughput numbers seem a little low to me. One of our V880s routinely chucks out about 850 Mbit/s over NFS - with Solaris 9 or 10, and the advantage of Solaris 10 is that you have many more spare cycles while it’s doing it.

Certainly our Solaris 10 (V440, W2100z) machines with gigabit can be clocked at something like 990Mbit/s using a single rcp. (Ouch!) I just checked a V65x running Solaris 9 and it managed to give me 885Mbit/s sustained.
mark 03.04.05 / 5pm

Hmm. That’s odd then. Why is my IO sucking?

I used ttcp to test the throughput on the Solaris 9 machines (the 280R and E2900). I did some quick-n-dirty NFS testing, but never really paid much attention to the results since they’re so variable. Like I just ran this quick test. Reading a 2GB file on an idle E2900 running Solaris 9(file was created on another host, so it’s not cached on the 2900):

# time dd if=testfile of=/dev/null bs=1048576
2000+0 records in
2000+0 records out

real 0m48.014s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m12.060s

Roughly 42MB/sec. The filer reports about the same (45000 KB/sec) during the test, and is otherwise relatively idle.

By comparison, from a v20z running Solaris 10 hits about 53MB/sec:

# time dd if=testfile of=/dev/null bs=1048576
2000+0 records in
2000+0 records out

real 0m37.913s
user 0m0.029s
sys 0m8.050s

And a v20z running a Linux 2.4 (!) kernel musters 50MB/sec:

$ time dd if=testfile of=/dev/null bs=1048576
2000+0 records in
2000+0 records out

real 0m40.360s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m8.540s

Of course, I’ve often seen single Linux hosts push over 95MB/sec to the filer. So right now something is either slowing down my filer or my network. And of course I just did another write to the filer from the 2900 and moved about 65MB/sec. Ah, the joys of testing on a live network.

Anyhow, what I’m interested in in particular is ’single stream’ throughput. One thing is for sure, it’s got me motivated to do some more scientific testing with a dedicated GigE switch.
Peter Tribble 03.05.05 / 7am

I just did a quick test along similar lines. But I don’t have many Solaris 9 machines left that I can use for testing…

Anyway, this is a W2100z running Solaris 10 as a client vs a (busy) V880 running Solaris 10 as the NFS server:

time dd if=humanest1.nsq of=/dev/null bs=1048576
404+1 records in
404+1 records out
0.00u 1.52s 0:04.32 35.1%

So that’s about 90 megabytes/s in a single stream over NFS.

You comment about single stream performance is a valid one though. My felling is that single-stream performance has improved in Solaris 10. That’s not my primary focus though - I’m mainly interested in overall NFS server throughput, and it’s clear that NFS is a bit slower than a pure stream over TCP.

I tried a pair of V240s (not quite identical unfortunately) running Solaris 9 and 10 as clients, and it was clear that Solaris 10 makes a difference there. I was getting 5.68s versus 8.91s, with Solaris 10 obviously quicker.
nagendran 05.13.05 / 2am

need to know the real time differences for solaris 10 over solaris 9