* Re: [reiserfs-dev] [ctgaff@attbi.com: Debian Woody Performance with ReiserFS]
[not found] <20021109000211.GA46264@attbi.com>
@ 2002-11-11 13:33 ` Nikita Danilov
2002-11-11 22:40 ` Ross Vandegrift
0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Nikita Danilov @ 2002-11-11 13:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Corey G.; +Cc: reiserfs-dev, reiserfs-list, ed
[Ed Boraas CC-ed, probably this is of interest for Debian people.]
Corey G. writes:
> My Problem and Solution to Bad Performance Using Debian Woody and ReiserFS
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> My first three attempts with ReiserFS and Woody were quite dismal. Not
> with the installation, but with performance. I was quite literally pulling
> hair out of my head because ReiserFS on Mandrake 9 performs remarkably
> in my opinion. Why would it work so awful with Debian 3.0? Note: By
> design, the default boot disks for Debian 3.0 do not contain ReiserFS
> support. In order to install ReiserFS during an initial installation,
> you must download the BF2.4 disks which have "experimental drivers". I
> have seen many comments on the web wondering why Debian still thinks
> Reiser is experimental. It must be driven by the ultra conservatism of
> Debian. Regardless, ReiserFS is available for Debian Woody.
>
>
> Addressing the Problem:
> -----------------------
> My first assumption was the kernel, so I upgraded to 2.4.19. No such
> luck. Untarring Mozilla took 3m24s on an Athlon 800mzh with 1GB RAM.
> The same test took 6 seconds on Mandrake on the same system. After
> digging into the problem I finally came to the conclusion that Mandrake,
> and probably other distributions, are tuning the hard drives
> during installation or boot. I dug around and found some rather safe
> settings to implement using "hdparm". After applying the changes below,
> my Debian system came to life. Now I could untar at the speed of light
> and still use my mouse at the same time.
>
> So, for whatever reason, Debian has chosen to be quite conservative
> with assumptions on hard drive tuning. I will admit that some of the
> parameters I tried locked up my machine. However, even the more
> conservative settings work very nice. My concern here is that
> other individuals are certainly going to experience this problem with Debian
> besides myself. Another colleague here said he went back to ext2 because
> the performance was horrible with ReiserFS on Debian. Unfortunately,
> this individual refuses to try other distributions so he never had
> anything to compare. Had I not seen the incredible performance on
> Mandrake, I would have assumed that ReiserFS was a very slow filesystem.
>
> To prove my theory about Mandrake pre-tuning the drives during boot, I had
> a colleague run hdparm on his Mandrake 9 installation. Here is the output:
>
>
> /dev/hda:
> multcount = 16 (on)
> IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
> unmaskirq = 0 (off)
> using_dma = 1 (on)
> keepsettings = 0 (off)
> readonly = 0 (off)
> readahead = 8 (on)
> geometry = 1292/240/63, sectors = 19541088, start = 0
>
>
> These settins were NOT on by default with Debian. The most important
> (I know this from testing) is "using_dma". After turning this on, things
> really start to move.
Probably this is because not using DMA increases CPU usage and reiserfs
already loads CPU significantly.
>
> Here are my current settings with Debian:
>
> /dev/hda:
> multcount = 16 (on)
> I/O support = 1 (32-bit)
> unmaskirq = 1 (on)
> using_dma = 1 (on)
> keepsettings = 0 (off)
> nowerr = 0 (off)
> readonly = 0 (off)
> readahead = 8 (on)
> geometry = 4866/255/63, sectors = 78177792, start = 0
> busstate = 1 (on)
>
>
> I simply added a start script to /etc/init.d with the following:
>
> #!/bin/sh
>
> hdparm -m 16 -d 1 -u 1 -c 1 /dev/hda
>
You can also use -X option of hdparm.
Thank you for your research.
>
> --
> Best Regards,
> Corey G.
>
Nikita.
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