[mikellanes]

well maybe just one...

We are a small publishing company, our art department is made up of 3 full time artists, we have them on assorted G4s, mostly DP 800's and 733's

We have a g4/400 as a file server running OS X Server 10.1.4

We used to run ASIP 6.3 but it crashed regularly, after upgrading to X Server we havent had any crashing problems but the file transfers TO the server are almost 1/2 as fast as they used to be.

the transfers FROM the server seem to be about the same if not better...

we are using several (4) 80GB Maxtor drives on a Sonnet ATA/100 Controller

Any reason the transfers are so much slower towards the server?

if you need any additional info let me know, trying to figure this out!

thanks!

-Mike

[pelorus]

Originally posted by mikellanes:

Any reason the transfers are so much slower towards the server?

What type of network do you have? Which hardware?

[mikellanes]

just a locak network, the computers are attached to a netgear 16 port hub, and the printers are all attached to a seperate hub

its all 100 speed hubs we are running at

we havent changed the network setup just the server software

-Mike

[utidjian]

Originally posted by mikellanes:
just a locak network, the computers are attached to a netgear 16 port hub, and the printers are all attached to a seperate hub

its all 100 speed hubs we are running at

we havent changed the network setup just the server software

-Mike

Are they hubs or switches? Switches are considerably faster than hubs even if both are rated at 100Mbits/second.

Are the disk RAID5, 1, or 0? RAID1 will give you best performance with redundancy for both read and write.

[mikellanes]

the main one was a hub, the one for the printers was a switch
the switch had just enough ports to work were the hub was

the hub is for the printers only now, is that alright or should i buy a switch for those as well?

how do i find out what raid the drives are in?

i think they are just partitioned, and the controller is the ATA100, but not the raid card...

can i sofware raid the drives in discsetup? do i need to erase them first?

thanks for the info!

-Mike

[mikellanes]

that fized it, we are getting about 10MB per second in speed tests.. hows that stack up to normal 100 Networks?

How much faster are 1000 Networks?

thanks so much for the help!

[Camelot]

Originally posted by mikellanes:
that fized it, we are getting about 10MB per second in speed tests.. hows that stack up to normal 100 Networks?

How much faster are 1000 Networks?

thanks so much for the help!

In simplistic terms, 100mbps roughly equals 10MB/sec, which is what you're getting.

Therefore your network is running about as good as it's going to.

Moving to a 1000mbps network on the server alone will help somewhat - there'll be more headroom for the server to serve clients (in theory, 10 desktops can access the server at full speed, without impacting others).

Moving the entire network to 1000mbps typically provides a 2-5 x improvement in speed. You won't get a 10x increase due to network overheads, server latency, disk access, etc.

[mikellanes]

the server & quicksilvers are all gigabit ethernet, so all i would need is a gigabit switch? ive look for some, they dont seem to be readily available

any extra speed helps

thanks for the tips!

[utidjian]

Originally posted by mikellanes:
the server & quicksilvers are all gigabit ethernet, so all i would need is a gigabit switch? ive look for some, they dont seem to be readily available

any extra speed helps

thanks for the tips!

As Camelot said... if you are getting 10megaBytes/second over your 100megabit/second network (not the difference in units) you are running at hardware speeds. You won't get any faster performance out of it than that.

In practical terms... 10 workstations communicating with a single server via a 100Mbit/s network and switch... if a single workstation requests a 100MByte file... it will take approximately 10 seconds to complete the transfer.

With a 100Mbit/s switch this performance scales linearly. That is to say... if all ten workstations request the same (or even different) 100MByte files at the SAME time... it will take ten times as long for all the transfers to complete... approximately 100seconds (1 minute 40 seconds). In practice it is usually a bit slower than that especially with transfering different files. In practice it also seems to take a little longer to write files to the server than to read them from the server.

What are typical files sizes that are read from and written to the server? What is the largest file size that you work with?

With a hubbed network performance is always less than hardware speeds due to collisions. Hubbed networks do NOT scale linearly. Even though you don't need the speed to the printers... you might want to consider a switch for the printers also. Communications will just be "cleaner".

We recently added a classroom for Final Cut Pro classes. We have 15 workstations for students and one for the instructor. We bought an Xserve fully dressed with 4 X 120G disks. We plan to run this on Gigabit ethernet (switch got here yesterday). Several problems came up that will affect how we use the system.

In general... the files will be quite large in size. On the order of a GigaByte or more. If we have 15 people accessing files from the server during a class we think that the students are going to be spending a lot of time looking at file transfers.

Instead of using the Xserve as a file server where all user data files are kept... we decided that the "best" solution would be to keep user files on the workstation. Each student would be assigned a workstation. The Xserve will make a backup copy of the user data from the workstations, using Retrospect, at night.

This plan should eliminate the network bottleneck from the "user experience". It will saturate the network at night.... but who cares?

Another factor in our decision to make the Xserve just an archiving backup server (it can also do other things) instead of a file server is that... the time and expense of backing up approximately 400GBytes of data would be prohibitive in time and money. Another way to look at it... if we used the Xserve as the file server and we lost the Xserve... we would lose everyones data. If we use the Xserve as an archive and store the "working" copy of user data on the workstations... then if we lose the Xserve we lose nothing. If we lose a workstation we lose nothing (since the day before). Simple as that.

[mikellanes]

typically the larger (photoshop) files are 200-300 megs

but the smalled (indesign & quark) files are 3-20 megs

where did you purchase the giga switch?

we must leave the files on the server, since everyone must access them at random intervals...

we backup every night, total backup is around 400Gigs, with about 3GB chainging daily... backking up to firewire drives & tape for offesite storage monthly.. it takes forever! hah

thanks again

-Mike

[geekstud]

Originally posted by mikellanes:
the server & quicksilvers are all gigabit ethernet, so all i would need is a gigabit switch? ive look for some, they dont seem to be readily available

Netgear makes a 4 port unit that sells for about $400:

http://www.netgear.com/product_view....32&zrp=148

Cheers,

-Nathan