(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Hi Yonatan, 2 Tb? That is quite a bit. :) I have done some work with larger coda servers. I am running one machine that has two coda servers running on it at two different IP addresses. One server is serving up a 20 Gb partition and the other one a 13 Gb partition. Each server has 1Gb of RVM. That allows my one machine to serve 33G of space. I'd be serving more space, but my disk is not big enough. :) The documentation for servers says that RVM should about 5% of data served. So we know you can run servers with 1Gb of RVM and that would mean you should be able serve 20Gb. This really depends on file size. Since meta data is stored in RVM, large files use up the server RVM space at a much lower ratio than the 5%. A single 1G file would take very little space in RVM and use 1G of file space. This size of file is most likely not the best kind of file to store on coda. On the other hand, I suspect that e-mail files may be smaller than average files so the 5% may be optimistic. But then again, if people mail a lot of pictures, the average size may larger. So using the above method, I would think you should be able to run up to 5 server processes on recent server class machines. That would provide 100 Gb per machine and the you would need only 20 machines to get to your 2 Tb. Of course, if you have 2 Tb of data, you may want a larger available space so you aren't too close to limits. I'm sure nothing like what you want to do has been done yet. In thinking about this, I was wondering if using a static linked binary might allow the RVM for a single process get as big as 2Gb. I haven't tried this. It may also depend on which OS your server is running. If you could get a 2Gb RVM mapped, that would allow your projected size to be 40Gb per server. The other question is how much replication would you want. I would recommend that each volume be on at least 2 different machines. I don't replicate between server processes running on the same physical machine. Using replication would double the number of machines you need to use. I'd love to play with even larger servers, but I don't currently have the resources. --Phil -- Phil Nelson NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu http://cs.wwu.edu/faculty/nelsonReceived on 2002-04-18 23:17:29