Thanks Michael, I've see the ACLs issue at three different customers in the last couple of years so it's very familiar. You don't always lose your security descriptors, just often enough to make things exciting. And the "neat" thing about broken security descriptors is how they make just one part of the file system slow which makes it really fun to find out what's broken. Imagine just a subset of your users that are compalining that things are slow.... If you're looking at a truly scalable file server then have a good hard look at PolyServe. Their active-active many times clustering absolutely blows Microsoft clusters out of the water and may end up being *the* standard for large farms. As long as Microsoft don't buy them first. I haven't been to Pittsburgh or Phoenix though. Are they close to the beach and can I go sailing in the winter ? ;-) regards, Rick On 1/11/07, Michael Pardee <pardeemp.list@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Reading the section on file serving it's like you worked here for the last couple of years. We redirect Favorites, Desktop, My Documents, and App Data and we have gone through everything you mention below and made all of the same tuning tweaks, etc. Even the chkdsk where we lost all of the ACLs, had to make it everyone change (maybe full) to keep production running, and then working hours and hours to fix it. Compression was also a huge performance killer as admins would use it to address free space issues. The problem escalated as the disks got too full and the defragmenting process became useless. Adding/expanding LUNs, uncompressing disks, and defragging had a huge affect on performance. Backups that took 26 hours to complete for a single LUN now take 15 hours. Since we use Windows clustering I believe there is even a bit more tuning that had to be done and it took us many, many calls with Microsoft to get it all ironed out. The hyperthreading comment is something that I will take back for investigation as well as applying the security via policy instead of the file level to address exactly what we saw with chkdsk. We are currently redesigning our back end file serving to use DFS and Windows2003 x64. I'm anxious to see how it works out. All great suggestions Rick. I have openings in Pittsburgh and Phoenix, just tell me when to have your office ready. ;p