Return to BSD News archive
Message-ID: <333E3530.794B@sgi01.grn.aera.com> Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 02:41:04 -0700 From: Lee Ward <lee@sgi01.grn.aera.com> X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; IRIX 6.2 IP22) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5g9hjp$api@flea.best.net> <5gmb58$6jd$1@news.clinet.fi> <5gn3ig$83d@flea.best.net> <5goqrq$5ak$1@news.clinet.fi> <5hd29s$e7t@fido.asd.sgi.com> <333C1614.ABD@sgi01.grn.aera.com> <5hhv1k$jh9@fido.asd.sgi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.40.197.84 Lines: 126 Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-pen-14.sprintlink.net!superego.idcomm.com!207.40.197.84 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38053 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6507 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29525 Larry McVoy wrote: > : These numbers seem pretty wild to me. How many hundreds of thousands of > : dollars worth of hardware are we talking about here? I've been working > : with super-computers on and off for the last few years - many SGI > : machines included. I've never seen an SGI deliver even the above claimed > : NFS rate on a local file system. While it seems that it *could* be done, > : I've just never seen it. I realize this is only anecdotal but it seems, > : to me, as valid as the original unsupported statement. > > Anecdotal my butt. I do this all the time on my lab machine. It's in the Sorry, you misread. My statement was anecdotal. Yours was unsupported. You give figures below to support it. I easily yield the point. As I said, I do believe it could be done. Just that I hadn't seen it. I've dealt with organizations with the funds but without the need for such a thing. I don't mean to imply they wouldn't have liked to have this performance. They just couldn't justify the cost on their SGI's. On the Cray's, maybe. I don't really know. > midst of an install right now, but here are some old notes on performance > from release 1.0 of BDS. BDS is an SGI extension to NFS for bulk data > movement. It uses an additional TCP socket per open file when files > are opened with O_DIRECT. O_DIRECT is an open flag that tells the OS > to go fast, you might think of it as similar to madvise(SEQUENTIAL...). > > Example configurations with performance results > ----------------------------------------------- > > The following configurations used IBM 2GB drives, BDSpro 1.0, and > Hippi. There were 3 disks per controller (fast&wide 20MB/sec SCIP > card SCSI controllers), the transfer sizes were exactly the stripe > width, and the results are in MB/sec. A MB here is the size type, > i.e., 1024*1024; all numbers are 4% too small if you like the 10^6 > definition of a MB. Expect much lower results if you use sizes > smaller than the stripe width, slightly lower results if you use > transfer sizes that are unaligned with respect to the stripe > width. The BDS writes are slower than XFS largely because of the > synchronous nature of BDS writes. > > All numbers were measured with lmdd, a part of lmbench. > > Disks stripe stripe XFS BDS > unit width read write read write > 27 128k 3456k 99 64 72 35 > > And I can do that on a uniprocessor R10K system. I dunno what our disk > prices are today, I'm sure they are too high in everyone except SGI's > opinion, but suppose a disk costs $3K. That's about $90K in disks and > mebbe $40K in system (should be cheaper but you need a hippi board and > we charge for those). Hardly hundreds of thousands of dollars. > So, what you are saying is that $130,000 isn't in the "hundreds"? Since you don't seem to take a hint well, I'll say it plainly: you are comparing a one-hundred thousand dollar machine to a 20,000 dollar machine. You are using figures from that 100,000 dollar machine to argue that someone should buy it or a cousin as a news server? Why? > > : Similarly, for a small group taking a small news > : feed, it may be approrpiate to use a lower cost PC than any of the SGI > : offerings. Then again, it may not. It seems to me that it would be > : useful to weigh the benefits and costs. > > You bet. If I was at a startup and needed a nameserver would I buy a $10K > SGI when I could do it with a $1K PC? Hell, no. You would be stupid > to do that. But let's look at that. I'm a kernel hacker. There is > nothing in the system utilities or the kernel that I could not rewrite > or bug fix as needed. Not that I want to, but if I had to I could. > Linux, FreeBSD, they are all just big C programs and I do C for money. > > For some people, the $10K is actually a better deal. They pay the money Agreed. As I said, "it would be useful to weigh the benefits and costs." > and insist that it works. Our buddy Matt will say that SGI sucks and just > don't work, and sometimes I agree with him, but a lot of customers do get > useful work done with SGI systems. Matt has larger needs than most and > he wants to get more out of a chunk of hardware than most. I respect > his ability to clearly know what the hardware should do. We tend to > make it get withing 10 or 20% of that limit. Matt wants 100%, will be > happy with 95%, starts getting annoyed at 90%, and is furious at 80%. > If all our customers were like Matt, we would fold up the tent. Most > customers know that most vendors don't hit a 100% of what the hardware > can do for all possible applications and they buy a little margin. To > each their own. > > : What is "real" work anyway? > > If you have to ask you don't know. Real work is not stuff that > works well on an Xterminal. An amazing number of workstations are > glorified Xterminals. Real work is rebuilding your kernel in a minute. > Running your datawarehouse. Serving up a few million web queries. > Real work frequently doesn't fit on a PCI bus or in a $200 motherboard > with flakey parts. Back to the problem of not taking a hint so well; I feel I'm fairly aware of what real work is. I was wondering at your definition. It would seem to me that real work would be taking place anywhere a tool was serving an individual's or group's problem. Real work is not limited to how fast a kernel could be rebuilt. It might also include the secretary down the hall doing some departmental books and word processing. It might be transaction processing in a bank. Yes, too, it might be data warehousing or a web server. My point is that you appear to dismiss anything that couldn't justify the cost of an SGI. Look, sincerely, I believe SGI has a nice tool. I am typing this note on one now. I use it daily, far more than any other platform I have available to me. However, the little BSDI box does name service and mail. I have far more cost effective things I use the SGI for. What I'm really curious about is why you are using numbers from a machine that is almost surely overkill for someone's request about a news server? As well, why spend all this time and energy beating on an operating system and platform that you go out of your way to dismiss? If it's so easily demonstrated that these little PC's are inappropriate, why can't the rest of us see it? I'll buy that I'm a dweeb but the majority of the world is a little hard. > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm@sgi.com http://reality.sgi.com/lm (415) 933-1804