[BBLISA] Fwd: Moving 100 GB and 1.3 million files

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

 I have a question regarding expectations for file movement between
disks on adjacent servers.

Due to a sub-optimal file system layout, I regularly have to move lots
of files between file systems.  The servers are in the same rack, or at
least in racks next to each other, and I am fairly certain they are all
connected to the same GB switch.

Moving blocks of ~300k files totaling about 5-10 GB takes hours to
complete.  Yesterday afternoon I started a move of 1.3 million files
totaling about 94 GB.  20 hours later the transfer seems to be less than
half done.

Does this surprise anyone?  Any hints as to what might be wrong or what
might speed it up?  I'm at a loss to know where to start looking.

Regards,

Ian



More details, for those who are interested:

The files at the origin are on RAID1 SATA disks (1 TB, ext3, Seagate
Barracuda 7200 RPM), and I have a ganglia snapshot of the 24 hour status
(you can see the start of the transfer about 20 hours ago):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1561496/shared/abitibi-origin.pdf

The destination is an Apple X-RAID array (4TB) connected to an Apple
XServe.  The corresponding ganglia snapshot is here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1561496/shared/macintel-destination.pdf

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