NIMS and NSS

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Nov 2001

I know the issues around Novell Internet Messaging System (NIMS), Novell Storage Services (NSS) volumes, etc., but I need some practical advice here, preferably from people with practical experience in similar situations.

We have a customer who wants to roll NIMS out over a campus environment to about 15,000 students. They want a centralized message store on a cluster. Naturally it's being done on NetWare and Novell Cluster Services.

I'd like to know if you have had any practical implementation experience on this, and whether you can share any gotchas. More importantly, I'd like to know how I can tune NSS to perform better with lots of small files.

NIMsNSSer in Nanjing

Dear NIMsNSSer: The Ab-ender has been busy working with NIMs and NSS, so you are in luck. Below is the NSS configuration that I have applied in my test lab. I have a 300GB NSS volume where home directories of 3500 users are located. More than 1,000,000 files are modified each day, most of them small html files. The server has 1GB of RAM complete with a 700MHZ CPU. I'm not saying you need to take the same numbers but I'm sure (or hope) you can get some good idea.

You will need to create a NSSPOWER.NCF file with the following commands.

Load NSS /nocachebalance
/minbuffercachesize=200000
/closedfilecachesize=100000 /namecachesize=40000
/openfilehashshift=15 /fileflushtimer=10
/bufferflushtimer=1

Then unload NSS and start this .NCF file (just type NSSPOWER <Enter> at the server console prompt). This approach will tune NSS to work more efficiently with lots of smaller files. It will also provide a performance boost for your network configuration.

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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