Wednesday, April 30, 2003

System Day

Side note #1 - copying from my game machine to my 300Mb RAID5 server, I'm seeing transfer rates of 3.7 Mb/sec over a 100Mbit network. That's a rate of 13Gb per hour btw... not sure where my bottleneck is atm. Using the System Monitor, and running a 30 second window on the Physical disk (e.g. it averages the results for 30 seconds) - I'm seeing total disk activity of 8.5-13.5 Mb/sec, evenly split between reads/writes (decrypting a large file at the moment, CPU is only 50% though). Capacity for the raid system for the most part seems to be 12.5 Mb/sec on this system (Promise SuperTrak SX6000 using ATA/100 drives) as a planning number.

Working with a pair of ATA/100 drives hooked up to a Promise FastTrak100 PCI card, I saw numbers of 7.5 to 9.5 Mb/sec. (This is a mirrored array.)

Copying a 4Gb file from the RAID5 server down to a local workstation, I saw throughput of 4.5 Mb/sec (this is pretty much the capacity of 100 megabit ethernet).

Using a program called hd_speed from www.steelbytes.com, I see that the RAID5 array averages around 38.5 Mb/sec read speed, while the RAID1 array on my 2nd server is only 16.3 Mb/sec (ATA/66 mirrored array on a Promise FastTrak66). The ATA/100 mirrored array on the 3rd server reports in at 22.8 Mb/sec (which matches the rougly 33% faster performance of the ATA/100 system). Server #4 clocked in with horrible performance (sometimes 30 Mb/sec, sometimes 3 Mb/sec) but best average was around 28 Mb/sec. (This is running a pair of mirrored ATA/100 on a Highpoint chip that's built into the motherboard.) My laptop (which has a somewhat slow HD) is capable of 20.0 Mb/sec.

Found a nice article too on MSDN which specifically talks about the performance differences between IDE and SCSI. Also, a listing of various HDD benchmarking programs.

Side note #2 - found an ASP based blogger system at xasperate.com - BlogWorks XML which allows me to have multiple blogs (no, I'm not giving up on Blogger, but I wanted something in the office for work related stuff, like keeping track of who did what).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 1:43 PM

RIAA

Tough topic - do music swapping programs reduce music purchases, or do they drive it? Frankly, I think it's about 50-50, but what's interesting is how the music business is trying to shift blame for poor financials for the past year or two completely onto the file swapping crowd. Is there a lot of files being swapped? Sure. But, earth-to-mars, there's also a quite decent worldwide recession going on, which means that there is a lot less disposable income out there to be spent on music. The music is not the only business experiencing a downturn - go ask the clothing retailers how their business has been when comparing 2001 results to 2002.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 12:14 AM

Monday, April 28, 2003

IP Filtering

Still haven't figured out exactly how to configure a pair of multi-homed DNS servers (that are also VPN servers). Don't think I really need to open up the DNS port on the external adapter since these servers are just DNS servers for our internal (private) domain that is a sub-domain of our official domain.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 4:26 PM