Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 23:30:46 -0700 From: Three Letter Acronym <tla@spiderchain.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: monster boxes Message-ID: <200006240630.e5O6Uk109216@spiderchain.com>
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Hello all, I'm about to take my first crack at building a couple of real monster freebsd machines, and was looking for some pointers from folks who have built similar boxes. Two machines: 1) All this has to do is dump as much of a GigE pipe as it can. Periodically, I need to pull the data onto another machine for analysis. My thought was to put in a second GigE nic to get the data out the back. Will there be too much contention between the two GigE cards? Which GigE cards have the best drivers? Will a second cpu help in this (in other words, will the interrupts from one nic land on cpu 0, and the interrupts from the second nic land on cpu 1)? The real issue is, I think, that the cpu would get so flooded with interrupts that the kernel would drop the packets it's supposed to be dumping....am I right? Would this solve the problem? I know, of course, that if the GigE pipe is running at above 1/2 line rate that there is no way the machine can keep up, but I think I'm ok there. In order to avoid disk contention, I was going to periodically switch the dump between two disks, so one disk would be receiving fresh data while the other one would be read out through the second nic to the other machine. 2) This box gets to store and analyze the data. It gets a single GigE interface (to talk to box 1) and about 500 GB of disk. What RAID controllers are best suited to this? I've not worked with RAID cards in about 3 1/2 years, and that was with SCO *shudder* and NetWare -- I also don't know which cards freebsd supports well under abuse. I'm perfectly willing to accept the notion that a single machine would do better, but I'm concerned about contention for the disks....maybe an ultra160 raid would be fast enough (with multiple cpus?) but I don't know.... Any info folks may have will be greatly appreciated. Thanks! --tla To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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