On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, John Widera wrote: > Hi, > > Last week we posted to the list for info about running Cyrus on 64-bit > RHEL. But we also needed to ask a more direct question about caching, > though, and didn't. So we are now... > > That q. is, does Cyrus actually benefit from large amounts of memory in an > environment with just a few thousand users ( <1000 simultaneous sessions) > and, say, up to 750GB of mail spool? > > Our plan is to throw 12-16GB at it, with the purpose of vastly increasing > the FS buffer cache (and decreasing I/O). Or, will that just be a waste > of RAM? > > Some indications are that, yes, it does improve performance notably: > > http://blog.fastmail.fm/2007/09/21/reiserfs-bugs-32-bit-vs-64-bit-kernels-cache-vs-inode-memory/ > > Anyone have any specific thoughts? Is there any other benefit we might > see from large memory allocation in 64-bit architecture? Funny you mention this, because I was just looking at the load average charts we maintain for our cyrus servers. Over the christmas break, I installed a 64-bit kernel (the Debian amd64 kernel) on our backends, which each have 4GB of memory. This is a 32-bit architecture install running a 64-bit kernel. The load average on each box is HALF what it was before the upgrade. I know that it is hard for a 32-bit kernel to cache a large number of small files, which is frequently the case with cyrus. It has something to do with the size of the lookup table growing too large for "lowmem" to contain. So even if you have lots of memory in a server, it may not be able to use it all for file caching if you are trying to cache a lot of small files. The 64-bit kernel does not have a split lowmem/highmem architecture, so it can cache a lot more files. Here is the output of "free" on one of our cyrus backends right now: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4051576 4024116 27460 0 414200 2703212 -/+ buffers/cache: 906704 3144872 Swap: 2000052 660 1999392 You can see the performance difference on our Cacti graphs at: http://admin.onid.oregonstate.edu/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=31 I would definately recommend installing a 64-bit kernel. Andy ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
