Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!erb1!wittmann
From: wittmann@erb1.engr.wisc.edu (art wittmann)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: NFS Support in NetWare
Message-ID: <322@erb1.engr.wisc.edu>
Date: 12 Mar 91 01:40:31 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com> <6614@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> <1991Mar6.171901@curly.Viewlogic.COM>
Reply-To: wittmann@erb1.UUCP (art wittmann)
Organization: Computer Aided Engineering Center-University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lines: 65

In article <1991Mar6.171901@curly.Viewlogic.COM> alan@curly.Viewlogic.COM (Alan Medsker) writes:
>Re: NFS performance on NetWare 3.x
>
>I've heard that Novell has seen a NetWare 3.x NFS server handle twice the NFS IOPS as a
>dedicated SPARCstation (2, I think) can.  I don't know if they did this for the test, but
>you can turn off the write-through-to-novoltile-storage requirement for NetWare/NFS if you
>like, which significantly speeds things up.
>
>Alan
>--

I've been doing some _Purely Unscientific_ benchmarks that I thought I
would share with you.  My tests involve three servers a one client
architecture.  Since there have been so many comments on the relative
performance expectations, I wanted to post my current stats.  I should 
mention that these tests involve beta software from Novell, so the 
end version may perform better.  Novell Knows about my tests, but has not
helped in performing them.  These results are from a single station test,
I will try to publish multiple station tests in a week or so.

The servers are:
Netware 386 on a 25 Mhz 486 HP EISA machine  (14 Mbytes memory, ESDI DISK )
SUN OS 4.11 on a Sparcstation 1+ 	(16 Mbytes memory, SCSI DISK)
HP-UX 7.0 on an HP 9000/345 (25 Mhz 68030, 16 Mbyte memory, SCSI DISK)

The client in all tests is a sparcstation IPC.

The test involves the reading and writing of a one megabyte file (a copy
of the sun os kernel on my IPC).  All times are in seconds, in the form

best time / worst time / average time

for five iterations of my test. 


	     Novell Server 	Sparc 1+		HP 9000/345
NFS to local 1.6 /3.5 /2.0	1.6 /2.4 /1.78		1.6 /2.5 /1.78
NFS to wc    3.1 /3.9 /3.32  	2.7 /3.6 /2.96		2.6 /2.7 /2.66
local to NFS 9.4 /19.8/13.3  	12.3/13.4/12.84		12.2/12.8/12.5
NFS to NFS   7.2 /22.0/14.84 	12.7/14.1/13.24		11.5/13.3/12.06
Total 	     29.0/45.1/36.7  	31.4/34.5/32.44		30.1/33.2/30.96

In the second line, wc is the word count program.  Note that all machines
are real world servers.  No 'tuning' has been done for NFS on any of them.
The novell server has both netware NFS and Netware for Mac loaded.  In
some previous tests, the Novell server actually outperformed the other
architectures.  This was under very light network load.  In that case,
Netware was about 1.5 seconds better than HP and 2 seconds better than
the sparcstation 1+. 

These tests were done on an ethernet network with about 8 - 12% standing
bandwidth usage (as measured with a sniffer).

I hope to publish a 3 station and five station test soon.  My feeling is
that multiple station tests will show more variation, and be more indicative
of true performance.  In any event I feel my tests seem to show that 
these stations are all in the same ballpark.

Art

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Art Wittmann                                  Phone: (608) 263-1748
Network Manager                               Email: wittmann@engr.wisc.edu
Computer Aided Engineering Center                or: wittmann@cae.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin, Madison