Hello greg.  The stripe width of the raid set is 
63 sectors, the maximum burst size I could get from the IDE controllers.
The bench mark I'm using is the output from show int on the cisco switch
it's connected to.  
-Brian

On Jul 10,  3:15pm, Greg Oster wrote:
} Subject: Re: nfs tuninng with raid
} Brian Buhrow writes:
} > 	Hello folks.  I've been trying to increase the performance of the 
} > box I'm using as a large RAID NFS server and have a few questions.  
} > I seem to be able to serve up about 160Kbytes/sec to about 8 clients
} > simultaneously for reading, and about 50Kbytes/sec for writing.  I've tried
} > increasing the numver of nfsd's running, from 4 to 12, and the number of
} > kern.nfs.iothreads from 1 to 12.  This made things much worse.  Knocking
} > the number of iothreads down to 4, while leaving the number of nfsd's
} > running make things better, but still not very fast, it seems.
} > 	Running ps -lpid on the various nfsd processes shows that they're 
} > spending a lot of time waiting on vnlock or uvn_fp2.  I tried increasing
} > the number of kern.maxvnodes to 50,000 from 6,700, but this seems to have
} > little to no effect.
} > 	Any rules of thumb on how many iothreads 
} > for NFS are optimal, versus the number of nfsd's running?  Are there rules
} > of thumb on how to tune vnodes, and other parameters to help streamline the
} > system?  This is running in an I386 box with 1.5R kernel and 1.5 user land
} > programs.  The machine has a raid 5 array of 15  75GB IDE disks on it.
} 
} *15* drives?  In a single RAID 5 set?  What's the stripe width? (not that it 
} matters much with 15 drives).  Also: what is the size of the files/data
} being transfered in the benchmark, and/or what are you running as the 
} benchmark?
} 
} > It's using an Intel on-board 10/100MBPS ethernet adapter with the fxp
} > driver in 100-MBPS/full duplex operation.
} > Any suggestions/guides/things to look at would be greatly appreciated.
} 
} Later...
} 
} Greg Oster
} 
} 
>-- End of excerpt from Greg Oster