European Laboratoryfor Particle Physics

Window NT 4 Scaling/Performance

TestsAlberto Di Meglio

CERNIT/DIS/NCS

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 2

Introduction Windows NT has usually a bad

reputation for scaling to large environments

NICE is currently based on NetWare, but situation could/has to change in the future

The NICE Web Services needs some answers now

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 3

Windows NT Load Tests We have started a series of tests on

Windows NT as a NICE application server The test has involved one server and (in

principle) about 3800+ clients running W95 (80%) and WNT (20%)

The tests have been run in two rounds for three weeks each. Only the middle week has been considered for statistics (curve is bell shaped)

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 4

Users Migration Users are normally distributed on the NICE replicas

at logon by looking a list of the available servers The list has been modified for all NT and

W95+Microsoft Networks clients

SRV0_NICE

SRV3_NICESRV2_NICESRV1_NICE SRV4_NICESRV5NICE

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 5

Server Specifications Digital Server 5000 1x Intel Pentium II 300MHz 256 MB RAM 2x 9GB/1x 18 GB HD on 2x F/SCSI

controllers (no RAID) 1x DC2104 FastEthernet card 2 partitions: C: (2GB), D: (16GB) with

NTFS Swap file: 256 MB

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System Specifications WNT 4 SP3/4 Home/Profile server with 3000+ exported

shares Performance/Network/Disk Monitors Real-Time anti-virus scanning Backup client with daily backups IIS4 (running, but not used) Standard server services

(server,browser,RPC,etc.)

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A Simple Simulation Test A simple user creation program

used to artificially increase sessions Program was running from 6 clients,

going through a loop to login a user onto the server and move a few NB of files

From Wednesday 22:30 to Thursday 24:00

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 8

Test Areas and Items Server (Sessions, Open Files) Processor (%CPU, Interrupt/sec) Memory (Available Bytes, Committed

Bytes, Pages/sec read) Logical Disk D: (%Disk Read Time,

Average Disk Read Queue Length, Disk Read Bytes/sec)

Network (%Network Utilisation, Bytes Total/sec, Bytes Transmitted/sec)

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 9

Server Max sessions

(R) 1050 (S) 2703

Avg. sessions (W) 762 (D) 592

Max Open Files 18039

Avg. Open Files (W) 14485 (D) 10563

Server

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

Time

Open FilesSessions

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 10

MemoryMemory

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

Time

Available MBCommitted MB

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ProcessorProcessor

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Time

%CPU Time Max %CPUs

(R) 46% (S) 100%

Avg. %CPU (W) 29% (D) 19%

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 12

Logical DiskLogical Disk

-20

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Time

%Disk Time Max %Disk Time

(R) 100% (S) 100%

Avg. %Disk Time (W) 35% (D) 21%

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 13

Network Max %Utilisation

(R) 9.1% (S) 8.5%

Avg. %Utilisation (W) 6% (D) 4%

Max Total Byte/s (W) 1.2 MB/s

Avg. Total Byte/s (W) 0.25 MB/s

Network

-10123456789

10

Title

Network Utilisation

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 14

Comparisons: NT/NetWare Sessions: 450-550 Memory: varies with disk size and

VLMs, requirements can be high %CPU time: 15-20% %Disk Time: 40-60% %Network utilisation 20-30%

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Comparisons: NT/UNIX Difficult to compare: the systems work in different

ways Sessions are defined in a different way:

terminals with users using all of the server: a few tens NFS nodes for file sharing, but not permanent connections:

1000+ registered clients, but how many users? We are performing tests to evaluate AFS servers as

file and application servers, show some performance penalties, but hardware is less performant, still not enough users to have comparable session figures?

2-4 December 1998 HEPNT Days at CERN 16

Conclusions WNT4 has at least the same performance

as other NOS and probably better memory management than NetWare

Loading applications from 95/NT client is a bit faster than NetWare (but we’re talking of 2-3 sec)

The right hardware is needed, but scalability not a problem even for large environment (up to 600-800 users/server)