Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TheBoy]

Though I do have a spare netapps filer sat under my desk, doubt netapps have remembered the loan

[aaronjb]

I did look into one of the toy ReadyNAS's, but performance wasn't up to it.  Start going to the big boys to get the performance - NetApps et el - and it seems power usage rockets. As does price

The performance of the Qnap is pretty good - granted it'll never keep up with a true big-corporate grade NetApp filled with 15k SCSI drives.. but then it's a lot cheaper  ~400Mbit read speed is quite good enough for me, though (considering it's all just streaming media!).

[TheBoy]

I did look into one of the toy ReadyNAS's, but performance wasn't up to it.  Start going to the big boys to get the performance - NetApps et el - and it seems power usage rockets. As does price

The performance of the Qnap is pretty good - granted it'll never keep up with a true big-corporate grade NetApp filled with 15k SCSI drives.. but then it's a lot cheaper  ~400Mbit read speed is quite good enough for me, though (considering it's all just streaming media!).

Problem I had when playing with a toy NAS was the specs look OK, and probably could (just) meet them reading large, unfragmented files.

Because of the number of VMs I run, disk access is much more difficult.  Our old P400 in the Proliant that runs this place (and loads of other stuff ) outperformed the toy Netgear NAS connected via gigabit

[aaronjb]

Hmm.. that must be some P400! SCSI disks, I presume, rather than IDE

The ~400Mbit was real world btw - I pulled a 9Gb file off the NAS over Gb copper to an SSD sitting in a little Atom powered box. Not that the box has seen a 'lot' of random read/write operations to fragment stuff badly, but it sees enough that I doubt the files are continuous (in fact they never could be considering they'll all be striped across 8 drives )

[eddie]

You might find this a useful tool to keep nearby.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Runs from the CD.

eddie

[TheBoy]

Hmm.. that must be some P400! SCSI disks, I presume, rather than IDE

The ~400Mbit was real world btw - I pulled a 9Gb file off the NAS over Gb copper to an SSD sitting in a little Atom powered box. Not that the box has seen a 'lot' of random read/write operations to fragment stuff badly, but it sees enough that I doubt the files are continuous (in fact they never could be considering they'll all be striped across 8 drives )

SATA (II with NCQ enabled). Big files are easy.  Average filesize of oof file is 1-2k, and one folder has 180,000 of these files in, and around 70,000 sub 1k files in another folder.  And with 40+ simultaneous OOF users accessing said files....

...and thats just one VM amogst 15(ish ?) VMs all making demands of that single mirror pair...


...yup, the P400 does a brilliant job, allowing us to run a busy site, far from optimised for its size (we are one of the biggest YaBB sites in the world, and the second biggest I know of), on such modest physical (and even more modest virtual) hardware


The NAS test was unsuccessful 

[aaronjb]

I don't know what filesystem it's sitting on, but that many tiny files in one directory has to be pushing it to it's limits! Would almost certainly kill the performance of any RAID5+ set, though, you're right.

What ever was wrong with just stuffing everything into a nice big SQL database eh? (I'd never looked at YaBB, the forums I've been involved with were all either phpBB or homebrew SQL based - I assumed they'd all be like that since it seems.. well, more sensible)

[TheBoy]

I don't know what filesystem it's sitting on, but that many tiny files in one directory has to be pushing it to it's limits! Would almost certainly kill the performance of any RAID5+ set, though, you're right.

What ever was wrong with just stuffing everything into a nice big SQL database eh? (I'd never looked at YaBB, the forums I've been involved with were all either phpBB or homebrew SQL based - I assumed they'd all be like that since it seems.. well, more sensible)

YaBB? Database?  Thats two words you never here in the same sentence .  And given our size/traffic, the YaBB developers were mostly right about the scalability.

I'd be the first to say that when we started, I was shocked that YaBB was chosen. But chosen it was, so we made do as best we could (and got kicked off our first host within 3 weeks IIRC


Currently sits on a (admittedly tweaked) ext3

[TheBoy]

The lack of a database does have some really big advantages though.  Thats not to say I wouldn't like to see it on a SQL backend though

[cem_devecioglu]

SQL usage would have many other advantages on the other hand imo.. as an admin you would need to back up only 2 files.. search and indexing mechanisms will be better.. however it would be necessary to rewrite all code behind which will require serious project time.. :-/

but must admit writing a site like this one without a database is another serious task which requires tremendous work..

[Terbs]

I only asked why my disk would not format

[cem_devecioglu]

I only asked why my disk would not format

 

[Entwood]

I only asked why my disk would not format

It's FUBAR.


Now back to the interesting discusion....... 


 

[TheBoy]

SQL usage would have many other advantages on the other hand imo.. as an admin you would need to back up only 2 files.. search and indexing mechanisms will be better.. however it would be necessary to rewrite all code behind which will require serious project time.. :-/

but must admit writing a site like this one without a database is another serious task which requires tremendous work..

But the base of this software is 10yrs old, when hosting accounts with MySQL were rarer

Even now, low cost hosting accounts with database support tend to be flakey...  ...and don't forget, running a MySQL server will make a big hit on system resources



I'm not saying SQL is bad (far from it), I am saying the method we use is not as bad as DBAs would like us to think

[cem_devecioglu]

now I take a glance on the source code..(as much as I can look).. phew.. many javascripts, divs, java functions, browser exceptions, color codes..big trouble, anyone who wants to convert it (including the programmers who wrote that) better write it from scratch (in case sql is on the plans) .. will take some months.. :-/