Macpro Server

[Steve Modica]

[Morten Ranmar] “Could I not install an extra ethernet card in the clients, and connect each via 2 ethernet cables to the 6-port Small Tree card, and get higher throughput?”

This won’t work reliably due to the random nature of LACP. It does socket balancing. So the sockets get randomly assigned between the ports. The algorithm on a mac uses a hash of source and destination mac addresses plus outbound port number (which changes).

In a best case scenario, the inbound file (your source) will come in on one port and the outbound (your rendered file) will go out on the other port. However they could randomly end up on the same port. There’s no way to control it. (I’ve never tried mounting on one port with AFP and one with SAMBA and then treating them as separate servers. That would be interesting, but ugly.)

A better answer would be to put a 10Gb 6 port card in the server and run 10Gb to the clients.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Here’s another way to look at this.
If your client drops some packets, its TCP stack will be very busy reordering and asking for the missing packets. That will slow down your client.

If your server is dropping packets, his TCP stack will be busy and it’s already very busy! So you’re going to impact everyone else.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Andrew Golden]

Random thought – could be totally wrong but he could have a genuine Snow Leopard disk and it won’t work. In my experiences with installing Mac OS on many different model computers over the years, I have found that you can’t install an OS older than the one the machine shipped with. If your Mac Pro Shipped with say 10.6.4 pre-installed, then a 10.6 install disk, even if it is a genuine retail copy, will NOT load on that machine since it is coded to load only 10.6.4 or higher.

When the new 2010 Mac Pros (5,1) came out, they shipped with 10.6.3. I really doubt you could install 10.6, 10.6.1, or 10.6.2 on it. In the past, Apple has updated the version on their retail OS installation disks periodically to reflect this but I don’t know what version Apple has in their retail disks at the moment. Easy way around that is to put a hard drive in the 2008 Mac Pro, install Snow Leopard on that and update it, then it will run in the 2010 Mac Pro.

Andrew

Andrew S. Golden
Director of Marketing / Technology Specialist
Video Corporation of America
7 Veronica Avenue
Somerset, NJ 08875
http://www.vca.com