[Spread-users] Spread Performance

Yair Amir yairamir at cnds.jhu.edu
Tue Apr 27 15:17:28 EDT 2004


Hi William,

I don't think the Spread web page advertises performance results.

We recently put a tech report (cnds-2004-1) on the Hopkins CNDS web
site (www.cnds.jhu.edu/publications) benchmarking Spread in a
specific network. I think you may have read that.
Here is the relevant paragraph from this report:
-------------------------
Several performance and scalability evaluations of the Spread toolkit are included below.
The tests were conducted on 20 Pentium III 850Mhz Linux computers connected by
a 100Mbps Fast Ethernet network. Figure 1.2 presents the total order throughput
achieved by Spread as a function of the size of the network (number of daemons,
each running on a separate computer) and the size of the multicast messages. In
this experiment, half of the participating daemons serve a single local process
each that multicasts to a specific group. Each of the other daemons serves a single
local process that is a member of that group. For configurations ranging
from 2 to 20 computers and message size above 1Kbytes a throughput of 60-80Mbits is
achieved with a slight degradation as the number of participating computers is
increased. Figure 1.3 presents the same experiment focusing on small messages.
It is interesting to note the performance dip for messages around 700Bytes that
happens when messages can no longer be packed into one network packet. Similar
but less pronounced fragmentation effects can also be noticed in Figure 1.2 for
larger message sizes.
-------------------------

Some important points:
- The operating system is Linux and not Windows.
- There is a daemon on each computer and not one daemon in the system.
- Application processes are served by their respective local daemon.
- Message size plays a role in performance.

Personally, I only have limited experience with Windows (some other
people have much more) but the experience I have indicates that one cannot
expect to achieve with Spread on Windows the peak performance we
achieve with Spread on Linux or BSD operating systems with similar hardware.
My intuition is that this is more due to Windows than to Spread :)

Cheers,

       :) Yair.
       

On Tuesday, April 27, 2004 2:29 PM
William Isley wmisley at hotmail.com wrote:

William> Hi Spread Group,

William> I plan to use spread to reliably multicast Gigabytes of files to 40+ 
William> machines. I have tried several configurations, and with only 5 clients 
William> receiving files (rebuilt from messages sent over Spread), the best data 
William> throughput I can achieve is 3 MB/sec. I am required to achieve at least 6 
William> MB/sec.

William> I have tried running the Spread Daemon on a separate server, on the message 
William> sender, and a message receiver. I get the best performance with the Spread 
William> Daemon running on the message receiver. I am using the SAFE message 
William> transport type, but have tried the UNRELIABLE message transport type with 
William> negligable performance gain.

William> I have tried scheduling Spread to run with Realtime scheduling. The 
William> performance gain was negligable. I am running all of this software on 
William> Windows.

William> I tried running the Spread Daemon on a dual Xeon processor machine. The 
William> result is that the Spread clients loose there connection under heavy load. 
William> The other machines in the configuration single 1GHz processor machines.

William> I need to squeeze more out of Spread than 3 MB/sec. The website advertises 8 
William> MB/sec. What can I do to better this performance? Are there any changes I 
William> can make to the Spread.conf file that will increase the performance? Is it 
William> possible to run multiple Spread Daemons? How to I configure this system if 
William> this is an option and what is the benefit?

William> I have looked at TIBCO's SmartPGM, which is not viable due to cost. JGroups 
William> advertises performance below that of Spread.

William> Any help from anyone would be apprecieate,

William> William Isley
William> IMS Consultants
William> 1250 N. Lakeview Ave, Suite A
William> Anaheim, CA  92807
William> Phone:  (714) 693-3505, x21
William> E-mail: wmisley at imsconsultants.com

William> _________________________________________________________________
>>From must-see cities to the best beaches, plan a getaway with the Spring 
William> Travel Guide! http://special.msn.com/local/springtravel.armx


William> _______________________________________________
William> Spread-users mailing list
William> Spread-users at lists.spread.org
William> http://lists.spread.org/mailman/listinfo/spread-users






More information about the Spread-users mailing list