[HCoop-Discuss] AFS replacement or hardware improvements?

[Davor Ocelic]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:13:00 -0400
Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:

> Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> > The ongoing debate on AFS shows that some members are not content
> > with AFS and therefore we should evaluate another network file
> > system. 
> 
> My position remains that networked filesystems are a net negative for 
> most of our members.  I think that, before we discuss details of
> network filesystems that we want to be part of our initial
> deployment, we should wait for the results of the poll that I'll
> announce tomorrow.

Well, there's one other problem we did not talk about.

I think the issue that should be taken care of first is our hardware
setup.

Our current machines and their specs are listed at

  http://wiki.hcoop.net/Hardware

Deleuze is more or less in good shape (even though it needs a boost
as well), but everything else is aging.

For example, couple months ago a friend told me they bought one of
SunFire servers with 2x Quad core processors, 8 GB RAM and 2x 500 GB
disk setup for about $2000.

A system like that is about 4 times better than Deleuze, and
incomparably better than Mire. (Mire is the user-accessible server,
where all work except mail & DB is going on for about 400 hosted
web sites, and it's running on a single 1.6 Ghz processor).

I believe a large part of slowness in our system is coming not 
[only] from AFS, but from a lot of processing that's going on,
including databases, mail and spam filtering that's going on in
parallel with serving AFS space from Deleuze.

Another thing, our AFS cache on Mire is only 1 GB large. According
to one of unrelated previous conversations with Derrick, a size
of up to 20 GB could be meaningful. Would increasing this help the
situation?

And finally, after Clinton Ebadi ran into trouble with setting up
the new server, where mail processing was to be offloaded, we kind
of "lost steam" to push through it, get the issues handled and
continue with the plans.

I am very much looking forward to seeing that machine set up and
mail moved from Deleuze to there.

-doc