Windows 2008 drivers, benchmarking, and loading of the drives/network

Happily, the Intel site has the right drivers for Windows 2008 for the motherboard gigabits. Just ordered some additional quad cards and a better network switch so we can push this harder. With 4 gigabit clients, we are seeing about 3.5x 1 GbE port in bandwidth. Working on it. Our test is incredibly simple. Set up IIS7 to serve files from a directory. Create 100 files of 100 MB each. System has 4 GB ram (ok more than that, but it is running 32 bit version of windows 2008, so all it sees is 4gb). Every random access of a file is therefore coming from disk. Curiously enough, under “heavy” load, the disk IO is not a significant contributer to completion time. The disk IO simply appears to be too fast for the network. Going to 10 GbE ports, and will test with 12 clients. See how hard we can push it. My impression is that the networking stack is not as fast as the Linux stack. Will need to turn of IPv6, see if this is an issue.

Some oddities … have to pull down a file first before we fire up our test scripts. Don’t know why but it seems to work well. IOmeter reported something like 920 MB/s writes, though I don’t know how to run IOmeter, so I may have misunderstood it. Fairly speedy under windows thought.