Re: [gentoo-server] Benchmarking & Stress testing tools?

[Sebastien Arnaud]

Thank you Tom and Andy for your insights.

Tom, the benchmark shown definitely sold me on 2.6, I went ahead and 
compiled and everything has been running without a glitch today even 
though I have been recompiling the whole system to stress the procs and 
HD quit a bit. My next steps are going to optimize Apache2 and MySQL on 
this box and run it face to face against the current Windows 
environment. I am excited to see what comes out of it!

Andy, looks like you had fun setting up those other DELL systems. 
Actually, I found a little trick that allowed me to still use the last 
1.4 release instead of having to go back to 1.4RC4. I booted using the 
standard kernel (gentoo with no options), and when it fails to mount 
the CD-ROM drive because it does not have any SCSI module loaded, 
simply enter at the prompt:
 >insmod /modules/storage/aic7xxx.o
then
 >exit
and the boot resumes to where it left off, and soon you are in front of 
your favorite command prompt and you can then load the aacraid module 
to access your disks (or megaraid depending on your hardware).
Thought this might help!

Thanks again.

Sébastien


On Dec 9, 2003, at 10:23 AM, Andy Dustman wrote:

> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 10:46, Sebastien Arnaud wrote:
>
>> Gentoo is currently running on one of those 6350 and I haven't' had
>> too
>> much trouble setting up (apart from the lack of scsi raid support of
>> the smp kernel on the 1.4 livecd). Anyway, I would like to know what
>> type of tools any of you might have used to benchmark/stress test
>> properly your Gentoo servers. The goal being to try to optimize as
>> much
>> as possible performance while monitoring stability of the system under
>> high level of stress.
>
> I've done Gentoo on a couple of Dell SMP hardware RAID systems:
>
>  * 2550 (dual P-III, aacraid driver)
>  * 2300 (dual P-II, megaraid driver)
>  * 4400 (dual P-III, aacraid driver)
>
> All of these systems currently run development-sources-2.6.0_beta11. On
> the 2550, I previously ran gs-sources for a long while; I think this
> was
> due to the aacraid support not working so well in vanilla sources (as
> of
> 2.4.20). In particular, before switching to to development-sources, I
> gave wolk-sources a try, and I think I got a kernel panic (it works
> well
> on some uniprocessor machines, though). 2.6.0-test* has never given me
> a
> bit of trouble on servers or my primary work desktop. These are not
> primary production servers, and they are not heavily loaded for the
> most
> part, but to test them initially for stability I did emerge -e world
> with MAKE_OPTS=-j4. No problems. I think 2.6.0-test1 was a lot more
> stable than 2,4.0, and it may be more stable than, say, 2.4.18.
> However,
> it is still technically pre-release, but that may be ok for your
> situation.
>
> (Incidentally, pentium3-1.4-20030911-c1.iso did NOT work with setting
> up
> one of these machines. It would lock up when probing the aacraid
> driver,
> and I couldn't use the disk with noscsi, because it had a SCSI CD-ROM
> drive. I had to go back to the 1.4-RC4 live CD. You need to use doscsi
> for the live CD boot options to get the SCSI support to work.)
>
> --
> Andy Dustman <adustman@×××××××××.edu>
> Office of Information Technology, Terry College of Business, UGA
>