On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 11:23 -0500, Andy Dills wrote:
The impact has been severe! Even with NFS-stored indexes, our netapp is seeing 1/6th of the NFS ops per second, and its CPU utilization is now at 1/3rd previous levels.
Have you thought about enabling Squat indexes? I'd like to know how much it would affect I/O and CPU usage in larger installations. CPU grows (maybe a lot) but searches should be faster and use very little I/O as a result.
By CPU, do you mean local server (nfs client) CPU or netapp CPU (nfs server)?
I'm guessing the former...for what it's worth, for those who have yet to have the pleasure of using a Netapp, the CPU utilization is basically your ultimate barometer of utilization with netapps. As long as you don't start hitting 90% CPU consistently, they will provide better throughput than local SCSI disks. The CPU tops out well before the I/O, a nice change of pace.
Local CPU is of little concern typically, as mail serving (filtering is handled elsewhere) is almost purely I/O.
However, I'm not sure how much value I would place on optimizing searches at this point...do users really do much of that? It seems to be potentially valuable yet underutilized.
Do you have some links so I can educate myself more about squat indexes?
Andy