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Date:      Sat, 24 Oct 1998 11:23:44 -0700
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        John Cavanaugh <john@bang.rain.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: another record 
Message-ID:  <199810241823.LAA05442@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 24 Oct 1998 09:08:58 PDT." <199810241608.JAA17170@bang.rain.com> 

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>>    Well, yesterday's killer record of 587GB from wcarchive didn't last
>> long. It's getting a bit "interesting" that we're so close to topping the
>> terabyte/day threshold.
>
>Why "interesting"?
>
>We still have a ways to go before you saturate the 100Mb ethernet don't we?
>(don't skewer me if i'm wrong, I haven't done the math) And I know that
>the Pro/100B isn't the "sticky" point as far as pumping data out to the
>rest of the world...

   The fast ethernet was maxed out for most of the day. It will be necessary
to increase our circuit bandwidth before we'll be able to go much higher than
this. Average packet size is less than 1000 bytes. Layer 2 packet overhead
limits us to around 85-90Mbps with full duplex fast ether. The addition of
layer 3 overhead reduces the actual throughput by even more. There is also
more data going out than just files being downloaded (welcome message,
messages that come out when you cd to various directories, directory listings,
etc. - none of this is accounted for in the stats)...this actually amounts to
more than you might think. The totals we're talking about only include the
total number of downloaded file bytes sent out.

>Can you give us some more details on wcarchives other upcoming upgrades?
>
>You had mentioned putting a 400Mhz Xeon in.  Is this change going to a
>allow more ftp sessions or just get the load average under 30 occasionally?
><grin>
>
>Thanks! ;-)

   The load average on a machine like wcarchive might just as well be a random
number. It's a composite of both disk and CPU "load" and isn't useful in our
case for determining the machine's potential. In fact, what is interesting
is that the load average (which is typically around 25-60 on wcarchive, but
varies a lot) is so LOW. Don't forget that we have *3500* file downloads go
on. One might expect the load average to be well into the hundreds.
   As for planned upgrades, we'll be going to Xeon/4xx in a month or so. The
main reason for doing this is the increased memory capacity - the new machine
will have 4GB of RAM. This will allow us to increase the FTP limit to at
least 10000 users. My main concern at the moment is that we don't have
sufficient network bandwidth to support that many users (we're just hitting
the limit of our 100Mbps circuit with 3500 users). We're talking with CRL
about our options. I'm advocating gigabit ethernet, but we may have to
settle for multiple 100Mbps circuits in the short term.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project

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