[comp.sys.sun] Sun 4/390 server

rich@ndcvb.cc.nd.edu (Rich Sudlow) (02/08/90)

We recently installed a Sun 4/390 server with 30 diskless clients
containing 16 MB of memory. However we found that it was fairly slow and
performance dropped considerably with just with just a few clients
running. It appears that many times the nfsd's just start to run for no
reason at all (Yes we did reboot the clients with the server). Has anyone
had similar problems of this sort??

Also has anyone done any formal testing of the degredation caused by
making links to links to links etc.. which are so common in the SunOS. 

I am also interested in hearing about the horror's of using ethernet or
FDDI between servers of the 4/390 or 4/490 class.  Thanks in advance.

Please send mail directly to myself.

Rich Sudlow
University of Notre Dame OUC
rich@samson.cc.nd.edu

jaffa@tut.fi (Salo Jari) (02/14/90)

On 8 Feb 90 15:33:02 GMT,
rich@ndcvb.cc.nd.edu (Rich Sudlow) said:

| We recently installed a Sun 4/390 server with 30 diskless clients
| containing 16 MB of memory. However we found that it was fairly slow and
| performance dropped considerably with just with just a few clients
| running. It appears that many times the nfsd's just start to run for no
| reason at all (Yes we did reboot the clients with the server). Has anyone
| had similar problems of this sort??

We have a bit similar environment to yours:

4 sun 3/260 servers (16 Mb each) and about 30 workstations
loading their disks through NFS. Sun OS 4.0.3.

We had the problem of nfsd:s getting in to a deadlock every now and then.
they seemed to be all in inode-wait-state.  With pstat -T it seemed as if
there really were no inodes free.  What we did was to triple the size of
inode-entries in system kernel of the servers. it is configurable in
config.c.

The original was:

int ninode = (NPROC + 16 + MAXUSERS) + 64;

which is a bit small as count of open files is determined using that very
same expression ... and as NFS (if I have understood it right) doesn't
really open files itself, but does use inodes a lot.

So far we have not (yet) had the situation occuring again.

Jari Salo                                           #  The  knack of  flying
Tampere Univ of Technology / Software Systems Lab   #  is  learning  how  to
PO box 527                  #  Mail: jaffa@tut.fi   #  throw yourself at the
SF-33101 Tampere, Finland   #  Tel : 358-31-162932  #  ground  and  miss.