[gentoo-amd64] Page size on the kernel

["P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@singnet.com.sg>]

Hi,

Just completed the install from stage 1. Truly a great learning experience. Plus 
it was made easy by all those great packages in the emerge.

The system is to be used as a nfs server for video editing editing systems. 
There are only two client computers are Apple Macintosh. So throughput speed is 
very important. The current system is as follows,

1. cpu - AMD Athlon 64 3000
2. motherboard - MSI Neo4 Platinum
3. memory - 2 channel 2G(total)
4. Raid 5 Card - Promise EX8350
5. Data Hard Drive - Maxtor SATA drive 300G x 8,
	- 4 drives makes one raid 5 logical drive
6. OS drive - 2 Maxtor PATA 80G as software raid 1
7. Two on board Gigabit Ethernet
8. OS - Gentoo for AMD64
9. File System for Data drive - XFS
10. File System for OS drive - ext3
11. File share protocol - NFS

The two client Macs are connected by cross cable Ethernet.

Here are my questions.

a. What is the page size of the kernel? Can I increase the page size? What would 
be a good size? The files I am using are all video files and they are large. As 
an example, good quality video files are 1100mb per minute and DV video files 
are 200mb per minute.

Is there any other setting that I can set for improved throughput?

b. What would a good raid 5 stripe size be? I have set it at 64k because XFS 
maximum block size is only 64k. Does this have any correlation at all?

c. What should the block size be for the XFS file system? When I set the block 
size to 64k it just cannot be mounted. What am I doing wrong?

Once this is settled, I will have to find out what is a good setting for for 
NFS. I plan to set the ethernet MTU to 9000. I heard that it is called jumbo 
frames and it is faster.

Please do comment and help. Or point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

P.V.Anthony




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