howdy,
i have a mixture of alphaserver 1000s/1000As running du4.0b;
they're set up to provide "internet access" to all our students. in
general, they're 4/266 or 5/400 cpus, with an external swxcr in a raid-5
config, with ~1gig memory each, and 2 internal disks - 1 for / and tmp,
the other for /usr (and /usr/var). in general, swap is 2-3X memory,
and maxusers is set to 1024.
the users get a curses-based menu, from which they can run pine,
lynx, and a bunch of other apps. users also use pop3 to get their mail
remotely.
the load and response time is fine, until we reach ~60 users. when
the 61st on-up user logs in interactively, the load goes up, and response
time falls thru the floor. i have a memory-based filesystem set up on some
of the alphas for the top 10 apps used, but that doesn't seem to help.
there's usually ~10-100meg memory free even when loaded, the disks are all
< 90% full, etc.
from their press releases, dec claims to be able to support several
thousand interactive users at one time (even more in 4.0c). am i missing
some basic tuning that i can do to support 100-200 interactive users? is
anyone out there supporting a large number of interactive users that
has better experiences? any suggestions would be great; i've contacted
dec in the past, but the one consultant who looked at the setup(s) didn't
have any luck improving the situation.
(btw, i'm not looking for tools to analyze the situation - i've
run the performance manager, top, monitor, vmstat, etc). thanks.
gary
Received on Thu Oct 23 1997 - 03:56:44 NZDT