[OpenAFS] Extremely poor create & delete performance - revisit

[Robin Yamaguchi]

Hi Ruby et al,

We've discussed a little on the openafs-info mailing list in regards to 
create and delete performance for AFS.  Being that we are in simular 
situaions as admins of AFS, I was wondering if you've made any progess in 
improving performance.

Some suggested on the list that our performance issue might be related to
network latency or other network-related problems.  To test this, I
installed an afs server and client on the same machine, ran bonnie and
recieved the same results.  I feel this is conclusive evidence that our
lack of performance is a configuration issue.  I've tried using ramcache, 
using all the client options in /etc/sysconfig/afs, changing my chunksize, 
yet all fail to result in any real performance gain.

Again, I used bonnie++.  While this benchmarking app has come into
question in regards to how suitable it is for distributed file systems, I
feel it still has merit in displaying my issue with AFS.  I've updated my
bonnie_results page to include testing AFS on a machine that is both
server and client (named vanagon.  robin results are client seperate from
server), along with an assortment of different options that too are noted
(but not very well documented):

http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~rhy/bonnie_results.html

I've also posted my postmark benchmark results.  robin <--> abrams is a 
dedicated AFS/NFS server to my linux desktop.  shell <--> mcp was done on 
a NFS client that is in full production.  We have less then a dozen NFS 
clients.

http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~rhy/postmark_results.txt

All benchmark results have AFS encryption turned off.

Any more ideas?

cheers,
Robin Yamaguchi