[Linux-cluster] Cluster heartbeat - minimum nic speed

[David Elliott <david elliott shazamteam com>]

Hello

We're running a 2 node rhas4 cluster with gfs and fibre attached storage

At the moment we have a pair of bonded 10/100 nics for heartbeat and gfs 
locking communication (bonded in active/standby mode)
There are an additional pair of gigabit nics bonded for general network 
traffic

We've been having some performance issues with GFS which have been 
investigating - mainly to do with slow file stat operations like find, 
and ls.

a comparison of a data set (700,000 files in a single directory) on gfs 
and then on ext3 is below

# GFS
[root mrapp1 ~]# time ls /free0/partnerimport/data/soap-2/ >/dev/null

real    17m10.035s
user    0m8.220s
sys     0m52.310s

# EXT3
[root mrapp1 ~]# time ls /mr/sig/partnerimport/data/soap-2 > /dev/null

real    0m59.854s
user    0m5.296s
sys     0m0.662s


Can anyone confirm whether using a 10/100 nic for heartbeat would be 
having an impact on performance , and whether it would be advisable to 
ensure these are gigabit?

Many thanks
Dave