[rescue] Overkill on an SS2

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> We'll see what I can come up with.  The space will come from some not
> yet determined number of seagate elite 23s that will be just striped.
> I've thought of, but haven't decided) of throughing in a FastSCSI2
> card with intergrated ethernet.  Then I could put the fast disks on a

Rather than throw the money at a FSBE/S or similar, I highly recommend
going to a divorced IO/memory architecture like the SS5.  Remember, in the
SS2 _everything_ goes through the Sbus and it can become quite a
bottleneck.  Thou'lt get better perf in most cases from a SS5/70 with a
single fast SCSI channel than a SS2 with both a slow and a fast channel.

> seperate bus from the boot disk and cdrom, and additionally I could
> assign one ethernet port an IP and server only flac files from it, and
> have the other port and IP be used for everything else.  This would be
> a somewhat crude way of getting close enough to guaranteed QOS for
> playing FLAC files.  Right now my flac server and all my other files
> are on one machine with one single 10mbit interface, and so FLAC files
> during network copies are problematic.

Going to multiple spindles will help considerably with latency, as the
10mbps ethernet connection is clearly the bottleneck with regards to
bandwidth.  Try that first.  SCSI transaction latency is not big enough to
bite you even with everything on one chain, the onboard SS2 SCSI bus can
saturate 10mbps ethernet fourfold even with overhead factored in.

-James