1. European Laboratory for Particle Physics Window NT 4 Scaling/Performance Tests Alberto Di Meglio CERN IT/DIS/NCS

2. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 2 Introduction F Windows NT has usually a bad reputation for scaling to large environments F NICE is currently based on NetWare, but situation could/has to change in the future F The NICE Web Services needs some answers now

3. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 3 Windows NT Load Tests F We have started a series of tests on Windows NT as a NICE application server F The test has involved one server and (in principle) about 3800+ clients running W95 (80%) and WNT (20%) F 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)

4. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 4 Users Migration F Users are normally distributed on the NICE replicas at logon by looking a list of the available servers F The list has been modified for all NT and W95+Microsoft Networks clients SRV0_NICE SRV3_NICE SRV2_NICESRV1_NICE SRV4_NICE SRV5NICE

5. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 5 Server Specifications F Digital Server 5000 F 1x Intel Pentium II 300MHz F 256 MB RAM F 2x 9GB/1x 18 GB HD on 2x F/SCSI controllers (no RAID) F 1x DC2104 FastEthernet card F 2 partitions: C: (2GB), D: (16GB) with NTFS F Swap file: 256 MB

6. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 6 System Specifications F WNT 4 SP3/4 F Home/Profile server with 3000+ exported shares F Performance/Network/Disk Monitors F Real-Time anti-virus scanning F Backup client with daily backups F IIS4 (running, but not used) F Standard server services (server,browser,RPC,etc.)

7. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 7 A Simple Simulation Test F A simple user creation program used to artificially increase sessions F Program was running from 6 clients, going through a loop to login a user onto the server and move a few NB of files F From Wednesday 22:30 to Thursday 24:00

8. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 8 Test Areas and Items F Server (Sessions, Open Files) F Processor (%CPU, Interrupt/sec) F Memory (Available Bytes, Committed Bytes, Pages/sec read) F Logical Disk D: (%Disk Read Time, Average Disk Read Queue Length, Disk Read Bytes/sec) F Network (%Network Utilisation, Bytes Total/sec, Bytes Transmitted/sec)

9. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 9 Server F Max sessions l (R) 1050 l (S) 2703 F Avg. sessions l (W) 762 l (D) 592 F Max Open Files l 18039 F Avg. Open Files l (W) 14485 l (D) 10563

10. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 10 Memory

11. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 11 Processor F Max %CPUs l (R) 46% l (S) 100% F Avg. %CPU l (W) 29% l (D) 19%

12. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 12 Logical Disk F Max %Disk Time l (R) 100% l (S) 100% F Avg. %Disk Time l (W) 35% l (D) 21%

13. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 13 Network F Max %Utilisation l (R) 9.1% l (S) 8.5% F Avg. %Utilisation l (W) 6% l (D) 4% F Max Total Byte/s l (W) 1.2 MB/s F Avg. Total Byte/s l (W) 0.25 MB/s

14. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 14 Comparisons: NT/NetWare F Sessions: 450-550 F Memory: varies with disk size and VLMs, requirements can be high F %CPU time: 15-20% F %Disk Time: 40-60% F %Network utilisation 20-30%

15. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 15 Comparisons: NT/UNIX F Difficult to compare: the systems work in different ways F Sessions are defined in a different way: l terminals with users using all of the server: a few tens l NFS nodes for file sharing, but not permanent connections: 1000+ registered clients, but how many users? F 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 ?

16. 2-4 December 1998HEPNT Days at CERN 16 Conclusions F WNT4 has at least the same performance as other NOS and probably better memory management than NetWare F Loading applications from 95/NT client is a bit faster than NetWare (but we’re talking of 2-3 sec) F The right hardware is needed, but scalability not a problem even for large environment (up to 600-800 users/server)