Poor performance on cp on kernel 2.6.27.7-9-xen (openSUSE 11.1)

[Michael Monnerie <michael.monnerie@is.it-management.at>]

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Dear list, (I'm no subscriber so please CC: me, thanks!)

I'm wondering about a problem that's not entirely clear to me. I have a 
machine (hardware specs at the end) that basically has two test disks, 
sdb and sdd. There's nobody logged in, no network activity (apart from 
my ssh session to have a console), no other disk activity. The two disks 
have empty XFS filesystems, and I create a big file with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/disk1/bigfile bs=1024k count=10000
which is quite fast:
10485760000 Bytes (10 GB) kopiert, 15,2056 s, 690 MB/s

Then I do "cp -a --sparse=never /disk1/bigfile /disk2/" and that's what 
"iostat -kx 5 555" says (just a part of course):
avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
           0,02    0,00   10,31    5,36    0,00   84,57

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-
sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sdb               0,00     0,00 1268,40    0,00 162355,20     0,00   
256,00     1,12    0,87   0,52  65,68
sdd               0,00     0,80    0,00  913,80     0,00 162442,50   
355,53     1,59    1,74   0,16  15,04

And "top" says:
top - 06:36:43 up  9:30,  6 users,  load average: 1.65, 1.71, 1.84
Tasks: 209 total,   2 running, 207 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  9.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 84.7%id,  5.6%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.2%si,  
0.0%st
Mem:  16504708k total, 16455832k used,    48876k free,      768k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free, 16133320k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 8534 root      20   0 14316 1284  744 R   48  0.0   3:09.19 cp
   59 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S   12  0.0  12:50.49 kswapd1
   58 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S   11  0.0  12:26.94 kswapd0
 8352 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    7  0.0   1:20.01 pdflush
 2360 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    2  0.0   4:56.28 xfsdatad/7
   18 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    1  0.0   0:03.68 ksoftirqd/7
 5709 root      20   0 53544 3184  556 S    1  0.0   0:37.80 archttp64
 8572 root      20   0 16940 1360  940 R    1  0.0   0:00.34 top
    1 root      20   0  1064  388  324 S    0  0.0   0:02.96 init

Now why doesn't Linux have 100 "%util" reported by iostat when I copy 
from one disk to the other? It's a large file, no defragmentation, so it 
should be fast as hell. Well, that depends of course, but at least it 
should have 100% util at least on one disk. Because if there's only 80% 
utilization, there are 20% left to use. Can somebody explain me why 
Linux chooses to go on holidays instead of doing it's work? Is it a 
member of labour?

I got a similar problem when copying between two XEN block devices:
xm block-attach 0 tap:aio:/disk1/test1.xen xvda w
xm block-attach 0 tap:aio:/disk1/test2.xen xvdb w
mount /dev/xvda1 /1
mount /dev/xvdb1 /2
cp -a --sparse=never /1/. /2/
(where /1 contains a root filesystem of an installed machine, about 
1,5GB data, /2 is fresh created, /1 is reiserfs and /2 is XFS)

And one last thing:
rsync -aPv /disk1/bigfile /disk2/xxx
That copies at max. 50MB/s, because 2 rsync tasks are started each 
taking 50% of 1 CPU - why doesn't the kernel switch the 2nd task to 
another CPU? There are 8 cpus in that system - 7 of them idle.

Machine data:
2x quad core AMD Opteron 2350 (2GHz x 8)
sdb: 8 disks in RAID-50
sdd: 4 disks in RAID-5
disks are not shared between sdb and sdd, there are 16 disks in this 
system.
Areca RAID 1680 16port SAS with 2GB Cache in writeback mode.

mfg zmi
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