From: trich@crow.omni.co.jp (Timothy Richards)
Subject: IP12 client nfs slow
Reply-To: trich@crow.omni.co.jp
Organization: Omnibus Japan, Inc.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 07:31:23 GMT

I have been somewhat suspicious of the ethernet performance on
4D series machines with IP12 cpus.  I decided that as we have
quite a variety of machines it would be interesting to see the
results of running spray from each machine to our main server.
Our nfs server host is a 4D380s using Efast as its primary
interface, (yes it's finally working).

The results seem to show that nfs is very slow from the IP12
machines.  The measurements were taken when the network usage
was very low.
The first two columns are output from "spray host"
The second two columns are output from "rsh host spray server"
The list is sorted according to how fast bytes can be sent from
the client to the server.  The fastest host is as one would expect
the server itself.

                   spray server->host         spray host->server
                   ------------------         ------------------
cputype model     %dropped    bytes/sec      %dropped    bytes/sec

IP7     4D380s       0.00     107408            0.00     151346
IP6     4D25        42.86       5395            0.00     131436
sun     sun         65.06       3300            0.00     131433
IP6     4D25        42.00       5345            0.00     124861
IP6     4D25        42.00       5345            0.00     124861
IP6     4D25        35.80       5982            0.00     123323
IP6     4D25        47.33       4975            0.00     120351
IP4     4D70        42.25       5450            0.17     115950
IP6     4D25        48.19       4888            0.00     113510
IP6     4D25        47.25       4976            0.00     112235
IP4     4D70        50.77       4640            0.34     104785
IP9     4D210       47.42       4959            0.00      89187
sun     sun280s     85.63      20517            0.00      43242
IP6     4D20        75.30       2332            0.00      26012
m68020  3130        79.52       1946            0.00      25878
m68020  3130        78.14       2065            0.00      25811
m68020  3130        79.52       1940            0.00      25288
IP12    4D35        45.87       5121           35.89       6093
IP12    4D35        40.28      89156           37.52       5949
IP12    4D35        20.40      72979           43.12       5432
IP12    4D35        46.21       5107           45.18       5185
IP12    Indigo       0.00     121785           48.02       4940
IP12    4D35        25.22       7016           49.05       4851
IP12    4D35        19.62       7496           49.66       4798
IP9     4D240        0.00     136820           49.83       4763
IP12    4D35         0.00     153657           50.34       4741
IP12    4D35        21.34       7330           50.09       4730
IP12    4D35         0.00     144780           52.58       4576
IP12    4D35         0.00     172241           57.75       4085

Interesting how all the IP12 machines are slowest when spraying
packets to the server.

Or maybe I have a problem with nfsd on my server.

I notice that after upgrading to 4.0.* the nfsd accumilate a
a lot more cpu time.  For example...

root   923   916  0  Sep 11  ?       873:48 /usr/etc/nfsd 16 

The output of nfstat shows that my nfsd are starved for input...

Server RPC:
calls      badcalls   nullrecv   badlen     xdrcall    duphits    dupage
251186660  0          186996284  0          0          7360       16.91   

And yet the output of netstat -s shows I do not have enough
nfsd daemons.....

udp:
        79954687 total datagrams received
        0 wth incomplete header
        0 with bad data length field
        0 with bad checksum
        514 datagrams dropped due to no socket
        144097 broadcast/multicast datagrams dropped due to no socket
        12559 datagrams dropped due to full socket buffers
        79797517 datagrams delivered
        79926500 datagrams output

I feel like I am in need of some new tools to monitor nfs performance
on sgi machines.
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Richards, Omnibus Japan.		work: +81 (3) 5706-8357
[Uucp]      ccut.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp!crow!trich	home: +81 (3) 3720-4088
[Internet]  trich@omni.co.jp