Hello, We are doing digital recording over a 100 Mb/s switched network to a dedicated Samba NAS-Filer and need to optimize our workflow and present some performance data. I just want to be sure, to not overlook some important aspect in my experimental setup. Let me explain in short what is our infrastructure: The Swiss Library for the Blind has started producing Digital Talking Books (see www.daisy.org). Our recording studios are equipped with Intel-PC's (Xeon 2 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 100 Mb NIC, SCSI-HD's) running specialized recording software under WinXP. The recording settings are 22.05 Hz sampling rate, 16 bit and mono, resulting in a continuous data stream of 353 Kbit/s (151 MB/h). The raw data of a produced digital book may have a size of a few GB. Some PC's are used for pre- and postediting of the recordings (over the network again), which generates less data flow but may deal with many very little and also some quite big files. The data goes through two dedicated Cisco-Switches for this audio-subnet: a 100 Mbit first and then to a 1 Gbit backbone switch, to which is connected our audio-NAS-Filer. This is a Xeon-Server with 2 GB RAM, two Gbit NIC's and a 420 GB HW-SCSI-RAID-5, running Samba 2.0.7a on the XFS-filesystem (instead of ext3 or Reiser) on Linux 2.4.16 (SuSE 8.1). Later transfers include moving these data to a digital archive over the network. Now I want to measure data transfer rates over this network (and CPU-, IO- and memory use) at the NAS-Filer, with different workload coming from the recording/editing-PC's. I'll do repeated single as well as multiple parallel recording/editing sessions of about 10 min, and I want to measure at intervals of max. 5 seconds (as time series), using the sysstat (vmstat, iostat, mpstat) and tcpstat and netacct tools. My questions are now: - are these the correct tools for giving me the right values, which I could further consolidate and analyze in some tablesheet (I cannot buy commercial ones, and I think SNMP/MRTG is not the right tool in this case)? - what will the bottlenecks probably be: Disk-IO at the RAID-system, the filesystem itself, Samba? - what are theoretical values for each part of this data transfer chain (NIC's, Switches, CPU+RAM, RAID, Filesystem, Samba, ...), and where can I get comparative values? - any other hints/caveats, e.g. what is the penalty of putting the interfaces into promiscuous mode? Thank you very much in advance, Manuel Elgorriaga Kunze ----- Manuel Elgorriaga Kunze Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired Grubenstr. 12 / CH - 8045 Zurich Phone +41 43 333 32 32 / Fax + 41 43 333 32 33
Hello, We are doing digital recording over a 100 Mb/s switched network to a dedicated Samba NAS-Filer and need to optimize our workflow and present some performance data. I just want to be sure, to not overlook some important aspect in my experimental setup. Let me explain in short what is our infrastructure: The Swiss Library for the Blind has started producing Digital Talking Books (see www.daisy.org). Our recording studios are equipped with Intel-PC's (Xeon 2 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 100 Mb NIC, SCSI-HD's) running specialized recording software under WinXP. The recording settings are 22.05 Hz sampling rate, 16 bit and mono, resulting in a continuous data stream of 353 Kbit/s (151 MB/h). The raw data of a produced digital book may have a size of a few GB. Some PC's are used for pre- and postediting of the recordings (over the network again), which generates less data flow but may deal with many very little and also some quite big files. The data goes through two dedicated Cisco-Switches for this audio-subnet: a 100 Mbit first and then to a 1 Gbit backbone switch, to which is connected our audio-NAS-Filer. This is a Xeon-Server with 2 GB RAM, two Gbit NIC's and a 420 GB HW-SCSI-RAID-5, running Samba 2.0.7a on the XFS-filesystem (instead of ext3 or Reiser) on Linux 2.4.16 (SuSE 8.1). Later transfers include moving these data to a digital archive over the network. Now I want to measure data transfer rates over this network (and CPU-, IO- and memory use) at the NAS-Filer, with different workload coming from the recording/editing-PC's. I'll do repeated single as well as multiple parallel recording/editing sessions of about 10 min, and I want to measure at intervals of max. 5 seconds (as time series), using the sysstat (vmstat, iostat, mpstat) and tcpstat and netacct tools. My questions are now: - are these the correct tools for giving me the right values, which I could further consolidate and analyze in some tablesheet (I cannot buy commercial ones, and I think SNMP/MRTG is not the right tool in this case)? - what will the bottlenecks probably be: Disk-IO at the RAID-system, the filesystem itself, Samba? - what are theoretical values for each part of this data transfer chain (NIC's, Switches, CPU+RAM, RAID, Filesystem, Samba, ...), and where can I get comparative values? - any other hints/caveats, e.g. what is the penalty of putting the interfaces into promiscuous mode? Thank you very much in advance, Manuel Elgorriaga Kunze ----- Manuel Elgorriaga Kunze Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired Grubenstr. 12 / CH - 8045 Zurich Phone +41 43 333 32 32 / Fax + 41 43 333 32 33