[comp.sys.dec] optimal number of nfsd on a DECsystem 5810?

gengenba@forwiss.uni-passau.de (Michael Gengenbach) (09/25/90)

Hi,

we have a DECsystem 5810 with one KDB 50 and 3 RA90 disks. As I understand
it, the disks are not very fast and the good I/O-performance comes from
optimizing the sequence of disk-access.

Now we are using the DECsystem as a NFS-server with 4 nfsd and it doesn't
show a good performance. We get a short 'NFS server not responding' on
the clients very often. Is this because we have only 4 nfsd and the 
controller can't optimize with so few pending I/O?

So what number of nfsd would you recommend (I think too much would be
a problem due to too much context-switches)?

Thank you

   Michael
--
Michael Gengenbach   \/\/\/\/\/  gengenbach@forwiss.uni-passau.de
FORWISS               \/\/\/\/
University of Passau  /\/\/\/\   Phone: +49 851/509-496
West Germany         /\/\/\/\/\  Fax  : +49 851/509-497

frank@croton.enet.dec.com (Frank Wortner) (09/26/90)

We run 8 nfsds on our 5810.  Seems to work OK.  You should feel free
to experiment to find the optimal number.  Because of the wide variety
of configurations available, this number can vary widely from installation
to installation.

					Frank

pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) (09/28/90)

In article <1990Sep24.215836.2081@forwiss.uni-passau.de>, gengenba@forwiss.uni-passau.de (Michael Gengenbach) writes:
> Hi,
> 
> we have a DECsystem 5810 with one KDB 50 and 3 RA90 disks.... 
> 
> So what number of nfsd would you recommend (I think too much would be
> a problem due to too much context-switches)?
> 

  We have 8 resident on ours.  I would not worry about the context switch rate:
  The "load" that the extra nfsd's create will be relatively negligable.

  - you can get an idea of before and after by running vmstat.

  greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny
  pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org