[OpenAFS] WAN speed

[jukka.tuominen@finndesign.fi]

Hi,

as a follow-up to my previous posting about Liitin project
(http://liitin.finndesign.fi)...

While Liitin works beautifully in a 1Gb LAN environment, running it over
WAN slows it down considerably.  Until now, a proof-of-concept has been
enough, but it has become a dog-fooding issue.
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have any CS background, so I would
appreciate greatly, if someone would bear to walk me through this issue.

There are two target levels to the solution:

1) Get the speed to a practical level. I believe it’s less than 1/10th of
the bandwidth currently.

2) Optionally/ hopefully get it to its target configuration. I.e. without
knowing the hardware or the user’s usage profile, you can get a good
overall performance right from the first boot.  The “hardware” may also be
a virtual one and the “user” may be an automated process, to be more
precise.

All communication must be encrypted.

Any suggestions how to go about trying to pinpoint the main cause of the
slow WAN speed? I’ve tried to google solutions to this for quite a while
without luck. Also, is there an easy and reliable method to test the
effect of each change (a script hopefully)?

Some base information about the test environment:

- Ubuntu 10.4 based server & clients (hopefully virtualized during testing)
- The latest stable OpenAFS from the ppa repository (1.6.0)
- Internet connection: 100Mb in, 5Mb out (according to speedtest.net)
- Anything else needed?

Any help is greatly appreciated,
br, jukka