tuning for maximum dhcp performance

[Frank Bulk - iNAME]

I serve up 10,000 leases ranging from 3 to 14 days.  I haven't spent a
second optimizing it.  It just works and has worked no matter what the
client outage conditions have been.

Unless you're serving up a campus where there is a real possibility that
thousands of like clients (i.e. VoIP phone) may power up and come back
online, there's no need to spend time over-engineering.  If there were 20k
computers on a campus that lost power and power came back on simultaneously,
many of the PCs would stay off (configured in the BIOS), and those
configured to power on after power failure would reach the DHCP request
phase at different spots.  At 80/second, it would take just a bit over 4
minutes to serve them all (if the requests were linear).  Would it really
matter if in the worst of all cases it took 10 minutes for every client to
be back online?

It's those networks that serve hundreds of thousands of clients that need to
spend time engineering a solution that serves up IPs in a timely fashion.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: dhcp-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:dhcp-users-bounce at isc.org] On Behalf
Of Dan
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 1:01 PM
To: dhcp-users at isc.org
Subject: tuning for maximum dhcp performance


I'm currently constructing a replacement for an old Cisco Network
Registrar setup serving about 20,000 nodes (10,000 with 24hr leases,
10,000 with 7day leases).

I'm running Linux 2.6.22 using ISC DHCPd 3.0.5 with dhcp-3.0.5-ldap-patch
and dhcp-3.0.5-next-file.patch.  I hope to use failover between the 2
servers, but haven't worked on that yet.

As stated time and again, the software will not be the bottleneck. Using
dhcpref's discovery benchmark, I'm seeing about 80 clients/second right
now with my new hardware (ping-check off).  When I disable the per-lease
fsync or move the dhcpd.leases file to ramdisk, it jumps to well over 400
clients/second limited by CPU.

My hardware is 2 servers with the following spec:
   Dell PowerEdge 2970
   Dual-core 2Ghz 64bit AMD
   4G RAM
   10k RAID1 System Drives
   15k RAID10 Storage Drives (just for dhcpd.leases file)


Do anyone have any pointers on running a system like this and achieving
maximum dhcp performance?

Some factors that come to mind are:
   -Other patches I should/could be using?
   -Raid stripe element size, read-ahead, and write-back?
      (currently 64Kb, no, and yes)
   -Filesystem choice for dhcpd.leases file?
      (ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs -- currently resierfs)
   -Filesystem parameters to tune?
   -Kernel parameters to tune?


Having a better understanding about how DHCPd works with the dhcpd.leases
file might give me some of the answers to these questions also.

Any information or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan