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A comment on Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Applications. Parent comment

Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by jiggawatts on Monday September 30, 2019 @06:06PM (#21120116)
Wow, a NetApp employee who's actually heard of performance as a feature!

I'm saying this because every time I hear that a customer has a NetApp I get giddy as a school girl, because their filer products have a literal turbo button that I get to press.

Thanks to NetApp I've had some career highlights of boosting storage performance of entire enterprises by at least a factor of two, and occasionally as high as tenfold or more.

I'm not saying that I'm some sort of storage performance tuning wizard! There is literally a single parameter that can be changed to at least double the performance of every NetApp filer that has been shipped in about two decades: Just increase the TCP Window size from the original 1990s era default of 17KB to something sane like 256KB and then everything gets magically faster.

This is why it's so bizarre hearing you talking about performance and working at NetApp. It's like hearing that someone was on the Trabant F1 team.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by tyingq on Monday September 30, 2019 @07:42PM (#21120702)
The default for both CIFS and NFS is 64k since ONTAP 8.2.1, released in 2013.

https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1401220/html/GUID-7FB...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by jiggawatts on Monday September 30, 2019 @08:45PM (#21120994)
That's still way too low. A window size of 64KB will be a bottleneck on any 10 Gbps Ethernet connection, except perhaps a point-to-point cable. Any real-world network with switches, routers, and firewalls will require on the order of 256-512KB window sizes for decent performance. You need megabytes for any link that leaves the building!

For reference, 64KB was the default in Windows 2000-XP, and is dynamically raised up to 2MB in Vista and later, and up to 16MB on recent Windows Server versions.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by tyingq on Monday September 30, 2019 @08:55PM (#21121050)
Perhaps to avoid support tickets for people with equipment that doesn't properly support window scaling. The 64k setting is as high as you can go and avoid that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by jiggawatts on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @09:55AM (#21125338)
What planet are you from where there is still such as unique and special flower that talks to only NetApp and no other operating system made in the last twenty years?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Appli... by tyingq on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @11:33AM (#21126507)
The planet where cheap or old or buggy routers, VPN software, etc don't properly support tcp window scaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_window_scale_option

I didn't say anything like what you're describing. Also not a fan of your unnecessary cheap shot.

[ Parent | on HN ]