OT: SCO Drive Performance issue

[D . Thomas Podnar]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 04:54:57PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2006, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
> >On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 04:23:46PM -0400, Doug Luurs wrote:
> >> Does anyone have any ideas on improving the performance of SCO (5.0.7)
> >> Disk read speed.   Some of our files are getting a 'might' large over
> >> time.
> >> 
> >> Would back-up'g up the filepro system, deleting it, and then restoring
> >> it
> >> tend to improve it's read access (Defragmenting it) help it any ?
> ...
> >Hi Douglas.
> >
> >Backing up and then restoring by itself will probably use a lot of
> >the same fragmented blocks, and your performance may not change.
> >
> >Backing up a filesystem, unmounting it, re-creating it (as in divvy),
> >then remounting it and retoring your files will breing them back
> >contiguously, resulting in improved performance for a while.
> 
> I would be very surprised if disk fragmentation were causing performance
> issues on SCO OpenServer systems, particularly in a production environment
> such as a business/accounting system.

Ok. Be surprised.

> This type of system typically doesn't create/delete large numbers of files
> which might lead to fragmentation.  Even in environments such as
> development machines where one is continually building software which well
> create thousands of temporary files, I've never seen any significant
> fragmentation since the days of SCO Xenix, and I don't remember this being
> a major problem even then.

filePro fragments filesystems easily. Files and indexes, open concurrrently,
literally leapfrog each other on the hard drive as records are added.
> 
> Back when we were running usenet news servers on OpenServer, there were
> frequent issues with inodes disappearing which would require unmounting the
> file systems to run full fscks so that the inode counts would be correct.
> This wasn't an issue of fragmentation, but bugs in OpenServer at the time.

All I have to do is perform a disaster recovery on my primary server
periodically and my access times go down. Sometimes my full system backups
increase in speed by 150MB/min as the hard drive has less work to do to
get the data streamed out to the tape.

My primary server runs filePro for invoicing, and filePro for registration,
and old fashioned RealWorld / Great Plains for accounting, plus file
sharing.

Even the most optimized OpenServer 5 filesystem, however, can't keep up
with modern filesystem caching.

> 
> Bill
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
> URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
> FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
> 
> Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
> way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
> complaining.
>                 -- Jef Raskin http://jefraskin.com/
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-- 
Tom
  D. Thomas Podnar
  Microlite Corporation
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