Tuesday 22 June 2010

Gridftpv2, the doors relief


Yesterday around 14:30 there was an interesting configuration change in the WNs at PIC. It looks just as an innocent environment variable, but setting GLOBUS_FTP_CLIENT_GRIDFTP2 to true it just does the business of telling the applications to use the version 2 of the gridftp protocol instead of the old version 1. One of the most interesting features of the new version is that data streams are opened directly against disk pools, so the traffic does not flow through the gridftp doors. This effect can be clearly seen in the left plot, where the graphic at the bottom shows the aggregated network traffic through the gridftp doors at PIC. It essentially went to zero after the change.
So, good news for the gridftp doors at PIC. We have less risk of a bottleneck there, and also can plan for having less of them to do the job.

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