Stephen John Smoogen said...

|useful info deleted for focus.
|
|> So, we have two (possibly) problems.
|>
|> 1) Are the stats wrong, or is the problem not really
|>   in the number of threads?  This is a fast, dual,
|>   quadcore SuperMicro server, so I'm not worried
|>   that it can handle the load; we have much slower
|>   systems handling 100 threads without a hiccup
|>   (the nature of the projects means this newer
|>   system will get a lot more traffic).
|>
|>   The NIC doesn't seem to be swamped.
|>
|>   Is there a kernel param I need to tweak for
|>   more open sockets or something?
|>
|
|actually I think you need to look at the various nfs kernel proc/sys
|items first before bumping up the number of threads. You could be
|saturating various memory handlers and such and then you are just
|exasperating the problem with more threads and such. The process may
|be running out of open files or other items.

Can you recommend a good doc for tuning these in the 2.6 kernel?
sysctl -a doesn't show me anything that looks problematic but
maybe I just don't know what to look for in this case.  We just
started using the 2.6 kernels...


|> 2) If I do need more daemons, how do I determine
|>   how much memory I need?  What is the limit on
|>   the number of daemons?
|
|Well the big issue may not be memory at that point but 32bit versus
|64bit. The box might run out of possible allocations at 4GB of ram as
|that is as much one process can map to. I am guessing that each nfsd
|is allocating potential memory it can use for readahead and is running
|out of what it can set-aside for a buffer.

It's all 64 bit hardware and the 64 bit distro.

% cat /proc/cpuinfo
[8 of these]
processor       : 7
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 23
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
stepping        : 6
cpu MHz         : 2666.829
cache size      : 6144 KB
physical id     : 1
siblings        : 4
core id         : 3
cpu cores       : 4
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5332.77
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 38 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

% uname -a
Linux elcampo 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5 #1 SMP Wed Sep 24 19:32:05 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux