Well, I set up two coda servers and a volume replicated on both servers,
and ran the Bonnie filesystem benchmark on nfs and coda. I also untarred a
linux kernel to check file creation times.

The machines were new Asus P2DS 100Mhz RAM motherboards with one Pentium
II 450 and a 4 GB Western Digital IDE drive. Each machine has 256MB off
RAM. The machines were connected via Fast ethernet and a Bay Networks
switch.

The venus cache size was also set 20 MB.

Both machines were running codasrv and venus, and bonnie was run on the
second machine.

For the 30 MB file size, coda actually beat nfs for block writes. On block
reads for the 30MB size, NFS was over 10 times faster... I believe this to
be because NFS is using the linux-buffer cache to it's advantange. Does
the coda fs module use the buffer cache as much? I am using the module
that comes with the 2.1.121 linux kernel.

For the untarring, coda was *much* slower. I'm assuming this is because
file creation has a lot of overhead and such.

All in all, I am quite impressed, and coda quite looks quite promising
as a base filesystem for a Beowulf-type cluster environment. My next goal
is to get 6 more identical machines set up (for a cluster of 8) and check
how coda performs. Does anyone have any suggestions on how many servers I
should run? I believe two is the minimum for data redundancy, and 8 (one
one each machine) would be overkill.

Here are the results:

Coda filesystem, replicated on 2 servers, 300MB test file

       -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
       -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU 
   300  1474  8.3  1629  2.3  1022  4.7  1420  5.8  1380  3.4  19.1 0.2

NFS filesystem, 300MB test file

       -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
       -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
   300  2268 13.7  2226  2.4  1150  3.9  2702 13.2  2603  4.7 219.8 2.0

Coda filesystem, replicated on 2 servers, 30MB test file

       -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
       -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
    30  3256 17.9  4405  5.7  3134  7.7  2007  7.3  3474  3.1 378.6 2.0

NFS filesystem, 30 MB test file

       -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
       -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
    30  2831 13.0  2216  3.3  3181  8.4 28403 99.9 115432 101.5 2790.6 18.8



Untarring linux-2.1.121 on nfs:

[troybenj_at_mos11 test]$ time tar zxvf /tmp/linux-2.1.121.tar.gz  

4.18user 3.97system 1:14.74elapsed 10%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (3163major+9197minor)pagefaults 0swaps



--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Troy Benjegerdes    |    troybenj_at_iastate.edu    |    hozer_at_drgw.net   |
|    Unix is user friendly... You just have to be friendly to it first.  |
| This message composed with 100% free software.    http://www.linux.org |
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