Are fileservers a waste of money

[Celeste C. Stokely]

Paul Elliot is asking if he needs a more powerful server,server disks,
local memory, or local scsi disks in an environment of lisp hacking. The
answer is *YES*.

Paul is running 4.0 and I'm at 3.5, but the answers will be much the same.

I have 13 3/60s(diskfull), most actively developing in lisp, and 4 3/50s
(diskless) doing much simpler work (frame and email). I also have a 3/280
fileserver. 

All the 3/60s have 20-24MB of memory, the 3/280 has 16MB. No lisp jobs or
compilations are allowed on the server. All compilations are on the 3/60s.

All 3/60 disks are SCSI, mainly WrenIV, but a few 141MB. All 3/60s have
from 60-100MB of swap locally.  The 3/60s are now awesomely fast. They
used to have 12MB of memory and 30MB of swap and they choked on lisp.

The 3/280 has a super-eagle, a Hitachi 892MB, and a CDC Saber 1.2GB. The
eagle and Hitachi are each on a XY451. The saber is on a XY753. The server
is almost completely an NFS server. (It also handles email and news.) The
server is rarely overloaded, as a result.

The problem for us is the network. We have all these machines strung on 1
poor, tired cheapernet. My users constantly read and write 13-15MB files
over the net. Our net utilization "idles" at 25% and regularly peaks to
70%. The users say "the server is too slow" but I can absolutely see that
it's the net.

Real Soon Now we will be going to thick ethernet, and will be splitting
into 2 nets, load-balancing the heavy net users on each net. 

So, the bottom line for highest productivity in lisp development for us
has been:  Add all the memory you can, go diskfull, configure lots of
local swap space, and load-balance the net. A major, major win was also
saying "no compiles on the server". That speeded up NFS service
enormously.

We're about to spring for some sparc machines (desktop and server) to just
add some raw MIPS to the equation, too. The 60s and the 280 have been
great workhorses, but 12-16MIPS is pretty intoxicating when your compile
at 3MIPS takes 2 hours! ;-)

Hope this helps.

..Celeste Stokely
Coherent Thought Inc.
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