Network Appliance and Web Caches

Jason Lixfeld wrote that he's getting poor performance with one of
his web caches while running off of a NetApp. I have a couple of
thoughts.

For background, Squid is derived from the Harvest cache, and,
Anawat Chankhunthod and I are the two principal authors of the Harvest
cache. Anawat and I now work at Network Appliance, where we have built
a new Harvest derivitive called NetCache. NetCache supports persistent
connections, benchmarks several times faster than Harvest or Squid, and
is optimized to run with a filer as the back end storage.
NetCache runs on Solaris, DEC UNIX, and NT. We're also building a web
cache appliance, based on the NetApp filer, that will be available in a
few months. The appliance version will run on many existing NetApp filer
models. You can download and evaluate NetCache from http://now.netapp.com.

As to your specific question: since one of your machines works well and the others
don't, I wonder if they are all connected by 100mb/s network connections?
Could some of your machines be connected by 10-base-T? That could explain
a lot. If it's not the network connection, then I suggest you copy
the NFS stats for both the filer and for the web cache machines to a file
and send a note to support@netapp.com asking for help. I'd also suggest,
if you have a Solaris, DEC UNIX, or NT machine near the filer, that you
grab a copy of NetCache. NetCache's disk system instrumentation may help
identify a problem, if there is one with the filer.

Don't forget support@netapp.com; they handle both Filer and NetCache support.

Peter

-- 
--
Peter Danzig               Architect, web proxy cache 
Network Appliance              Direct:    (408) 367-3402
2770 San Tomas Expressway       Fax:       (408) 367-3451  
Santa Clara, CA 95051             http://www.netapp.com