Subject: NFS writes NetBSD vs FreeBSD
To: None <port-alpha@netbsd.org>
From: Stephen M. Jones <smj@cirr.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 07/15/2004 01:27:49
This is really interesting to see. Just a little background, I had installed
FreeBSD 5.2.1 on two CS20s and had them act as NFS client/servers to
each other while they continuously wrote large files on each other's
NFS mounted disks. The CS20s are basically identical in memory and disk,
and as you'd expect the numbers for writing on each other's mounts were
fairly even with numbers between ~2070000 and ~3011000 B/s .. slow for
100mbit ethernet, but fair for NFS you might think.
Today, I decided to give NetBSD 2.0x another shot and installed 2.0F on
one CS20 (the later with the 2.0G kernel) and continued the writing on
NFS mounts. Besides the issues I wrote about earlier with the generic
SMP kernel locking up within an hour then nfsio performance degregation
and weird locking problems, I've noticed that the NetBSD client writes
faster to the FreeBSD server than vice versa. I should also note that
numbers I'm seeing from the FreeBSD client writes are a 1/3 or less of
what they were when it was writing to a FreeBSD server.
Client Server Low B/s High B/s Avg B/s Iterations Generated Zeros
FreeBSD NetBSD 1118474 725269 888298 82 200MB
NetBSD FreeBSD 1728968 3433563 2421736 82 200MB
Avg is based on the sum of all 82 iterations. I should also note that
although the two machines are using the same network, device type and
medium, the NetBSD machine has reported 24247 errors and has had a few
interface timeouts which could have prevented the FreeBSD client from
writing fast enough .. However, since its the same ethernet device,
it obviously can write out well enough to the FreeBSD server. Again,
no tweaking, just fresh installs .. so I am assuming that the writes are 32k.