Re: high throughput storage server?

On 24/02/11 21:28, Matt Garman wrote:

Wow, I can't believe the number of responses I've received to this
question.  I've been trying to digest it all.  I'm going to throw some
follow-up comments as time allows, starting here...

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:43 AM, David Brown[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

If you are not too bothered about write performance, I'd put a fair amount
of the budget into ram rather than just disk performance.  When you've got
the ram space to make sure small reads are mostly cached, the main
bottleneck will be sequential reads - and big hard disks handle sequential
reads as fast as expensive SSDs.

I could be wrong, but I'm not so sure RAM would be beneficial for our
case.  Are workload is virtually all reads, however, these are huge
reads.  The analysis programs basically do a full read of data files
that are generally pretty big: roughly 100 MB to 5 GB in the worst
case.  Average file size is maybe 500 MB (rough estimate).  And there
are hundreds of these falls, all of which need "immediate" access.  So
to cache these in RAM, seems like it would take an awful lot of RAM.

RAM for cache makes a difference if the same file is read more than once.  That applies equally to big files - but only if more than one machine is reading the same file.  If they are all reading different files, then - as you say - there won't be much to gain as each file is only used once.

Still, when you have so much data going from the disks and out to the clients, it is good to have plenty of ram for buffering, even if it is only used once.