paul@uunet.uu.net (Paul Elliott) (05/03/89)
We currently have network running SunOS 4.0 consisting of: fileserver Sun3/260 16M memory xylogics 451 1 x fujitsu eagle 1 x fujitsu swallow With the following diskless clients. 1 x client Sun3/60 12M memory (lisp programming) 3 x clients Sun3/50 4M memory (lisp programming) 2 x clients Sun3/50 4M memory (C & fortran) The performance of the above network can deteriorate markedly as swapping activity increases. This is especially so as more lisp processes are running. Even the 3/60 with 12 Meg suffers poor response times when there are two or more lisp processes running. The problem is getting access to swap space on the disk. We will be adding some extra clients over the next few months and wish to upgrade the existing hardware and/or buy a more powerful server. What we would like to know is where to spend the money. The alternatives appear to be : 1. New high speed disk for existing server. 2. New more powerful fileserver with high speed disk. 3. Providing 3/60s or equivalent with 20 Megs for the lisp programmers and upgrading the 3/50s. 4. Providing local SCSI disks giving each client local swap space (dataless client configuration) 5. Some combination of the above. We would especially like to hear from sites that have a similar configuration to ours and also run memory intensive applications. Looking at the alternatives above we could spend money on a more powerful fileserver or a similar amount on additional memory and local disks for each client. For money spent which alternative gives the best performance improvement. I personally feel that a more powerful fileserver is still going to suffer a bottleneck at the disk with clients fighting for access to swap space, even if a new server provided twice the disk I/O speed compared to the existing server.