Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[Justin Piszcz]

I have 12 enterprise-class seagate 1TiB disks on a 965 desktop board and 
it appears I have hit the limit, if I were able to get the maximum speed 
of all drives, ~70MiB/avg * 12 = 840MiB/s but it seems to stop aound 774 
MiB/s (currently running badblocks on all drives)..

I am testing some drives for someone and was curious to see how far one 
can push the disks/backplane to their theoretical limit.

dstat output:
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw
   1  12   0  83   3   2|   -     0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |  13k   23k
   1  11   0  84   2   2| 774M    0 |2100B 7373B|   0     0 |  13k   23k
   1  12   0  83   3   2| 774M    0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |  13k   23k
   1  11   0  82   4   2| 774M    0 |2030B 5178B|   0     0 |  13k   23k
   1  11   0  83   4   2| 774M    0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |  13k   23k
   1  11   0  83   3   2| 774M    0 |2264B 6225B|   0     0 |  13k   23k

vmstat 1 output:
~$ vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
  0 12    124 3841772      8  13012    0    0 12595 163880  379  352  0 31 37 32
  2 12    124 3841772      8  12992    0    0 791744     8 12796 23033  1 18  0 82
  0 12    124 3841772      8  12992    0    0 792192     0 12677 22918  1 15  0 84
  0 12    124 3841772      8  12992    0    0 792960     0 12894 22929  1 15  0 84

When I was writing to all of the drives it was maxing out around ~650 
MiB/s.

I also have 2 raptors on a PCI card (as I ran out of PCI-e cards) and:
When I read from 1 of the raptors (w/ dd/example shown below) the speed 
drops:

   1  13   0  79   5   3| 764M    0 |2240B 7105B|   0     0 |  12k   21k
   1  13   0  80   5   2| 764M    0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |  12k   21k
   1  11   0  82   5   2| 764M    0 |2170B 5446B|   0     0 |  12k   21k
   1  12   0  81   5   2| 762M    0 |   0     0 |   0     0 |  12k   21k

Does/has anyone done this with server intel board/would greater speeds be 
achievable?

Also, how does AMD fair in this regard?  Has anyone run similar tests?
For instance if you have 12 disks in your host you could:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/null bs=1M
dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/dev/null bs=1M

What rate(s) do you get?

Justin.

Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote:

> I have 12 enterprise-class seagate 1TiB disks on a 965 desktop board and it 
> appears I have hit the limit, if I were able to get the maximum speed of all 
> drives, ~70MiB/avg * 12 = 840MiB/s but it seems to stop aound 774 MiB/s 
> (currently running badblocks on all drives)..

Small correction, they are 7200.11 Seagate Desktop Drives (ST31000340AS), 
not enterprise drives:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=0732f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274

Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[Justin Piszcz]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote:

>
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote:
>
>> I have 12 enterprise-class seagate 1TiB disks on a 965 desktop board and it 
>> appears I have hit the limit, if I were able to get the maximum speed of 
>> all drives, ~70MiB/avg * 12 = 840MiB/s but it seems to stop aound 774 MiB/s 
>> (currently running badblocks on all drives)..
>
> Small correction, they are 7200.11 Seagate Desktop Drives (ST31000340AS), not 
> enterprise drives:
>
> http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=0732f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274
>
>

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/g965/diagram.jpg

Basically it appears I am hammering the southbridge as for this board the 
PCI-e (x1) slots also traverse through the southbridge.

  6_SATA -> G965 ICH8
3_PCI-e -> G965 ICH8

From which has to ship that data across the DMI (2GB) link to the 
northbridge.

If one utilized a 12, 16 or 24 port raid card (but used SW RAID) on the 
x16 slot on the northbridge itself, would this barrier exist as the:
GMCH<->CPU is (8.5GB/s)..?

Also on the X38 and X48 the speed increases slightly:
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/X38/X38_Block_Diagram.jpg (10.6GB/s)
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/x48/x48_block_diagram.jpg (12.8GB/s)

If one asks why would one need such speed?

Example:
LTO-4 drives can write at 120 MiB/s each:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

It is then therefore imperative one could sustain this rate to possibly 
multiple(!) tape drives on a single system.

Justin.

Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[Willy Tarreau]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2008 at 07:26:09AM -0400, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
> >
> >On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote:
> >
> >>I have 12 enterprise-class seagate 1TiB disks on a 965 desktop board and 
> >>it appears I have hit the limit, if I were able to get the maximum speed 
> >>of all drives, ~70MiB/avg * 12 = 840MiB/s but it seems to stop aound 774 
> >>MiB/s (currently running badblocks on all drives)..
> >
> >Small correction, they are 7200.11 Seagate Desktop Drives (ST31000340AS), 
> >not enterprise drives:
> >
> >http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=0732f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
> >http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274
> >
> >
> 
> http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/g965/diagram.jpg
> 
> Basically it appears I am hammering the southbridge as for this board the 
> PCI-e (x1) slots also traverse through the southbridge.
> 
>  6_SATA -> G965 ICH8
> 3_PCI-e -> G965 ICH8
> 
> >From which has to ship that data across the DMI (2GB) link to the 
> northbridge.
> 
> If one utilized a 12, 16 or 24 port raid card (but used SW RAID) on the 
> x16 slot on the northbridge itself, would this barrier exist as the:
> GMCH<->CPU is (8.5GB/s)..?
> 
> Also on the X38 and X48 the speed increases slightly:
> http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/X38/X38_Block_Diagram.jpg (10.6GB/s)
> http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/x48/x48_block_diagram.jpg (12.8GB/s)
> 
> If one asks why would one need such speed?

It looks like graphic games are pushing the technologies to their
limits, which is good for us. I have bought X38 motherboards for
10 Gbps experimentations, and this chipset is perfectly capable of
feeding two Myri10GE NICs (20 Gbps total). This is 2.5 GB/s, not
counting overhead. So I/O bandwidth is a premium requirement today.

Other chipsets I have tested (945 and 965) were very poor (about 4.7
and 6.5 Gbps respectively if my memory serves me right).

Willy

Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[David Lethe]

-----Original Message-----

From:  "Justin Piszcz" <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
Subj:  Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?
Date:  Sun Jun 1, 2008 6:02 am
Size:  793 bytes
To:  "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>; "linux-raid@vger.kernel.org" <linux-raid@vger.kernel.org>; "xfs@oss.sgi.com" <xfs@oss.sgi.com>

 
On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Justin Piszcz wrote: 
 
> I have 12 enterprise-class seagate 1TiB disks on a 965 desktop board and it  
> appears I have hit the limit, if I were able to get the maximum speed of all  
> drives, ~70MiB/avg * 12 = 840MiB/s but it seems to stop aound 774 MiB/s  
> (currently running badblocks on all drives).. 
 
Small correction, they are 7200.11 Seagate Desktop Drives (ST31000340AS),  
not enterprise drives: 
 
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=0732f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274 
 
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Re: Limits of the 965 chipset & 3 PCI-e cards/southbridge? ~774MiB/s peak for read, ~650MiB/s peak for write?

[Bryan Mesich]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2008 at 05:45:39AM -0400, Justin Piszcz wrote:

> I am testing some drives for someone and was curious to see how far one can 
> push the disks/backplane to their theoretical limit.

This testing would indeed only suggest theoretical limits.  In a
production environment, I think a person would be hard pressed to
reproduce these numbers. 

> Does/has anyone done this with server intel board/would greater speeds be 
> achievable?

Nope, but your post inspired me to give it a try.  My setup is as
follows:

Kernel:			linux 2.6.25.3-18 (Fedora 9)
Motherboard:		Intel SE7520BD2-DDR2
SATA Controller:	(2) 8 port 3Ware 9550SX
Disks			(12) 750GB Seagate ST3750640NS

Disks sd[a-h] are plugged into the first 3Ware controller while
sd[i-l] are plugged into the second controller.  Both 3Ware cards
are plugged onto PCIX 100 slots.  The disks are being exported as
"single disk" and write caching has been disabled.  The OS is 
loaded on sd[a-d] (small 10GB partitions mirrored). For my first 
test, I ran dd on a single disk:

dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/null bs=1M

dstat -D sde

----total-cpu-usage---- --dsk/sde-- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  0   7  53  40   0   0|  78M    0 | 526B  420B|   0     0 |1263  2559 
  0   8  53  38   0   0|  79M    0 | 574B  420B|   0     0 |1262  2529 
  0   7  54  39   0   0|  78M    0 | 390B  420B|   0     0 |1262  2576 
  0   7  54  39   0   0|  76M    0 | 284B  420B|   0     0 |1216  2450 
  0   8  54  38   0   0|  76M    0 | 376B  420B|   0     0 |1236  2489 
  0   9  54  36   0   0|  79M    0 | 397B  420B|   0     0 |1265  2537 
  0   9  54  37   0   0|  77M    0 | 344B  510B|   0     0 |1262  2872 
  0   8  54  38   0   0|  75M    0 | 637B  420B|   0     0 |1214  2992 
  0   8  53  38   0   0|  78M    0 | 422B  420B|   0     0 |1279  3179 

And for a write:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde bs=1M

dstat -D sde

----total-cpu-usage---- --dsk/sde-- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  0   7   2  90   0   0|   0    73M| 637B  420B|   0     0 | 614   166 
  0   7   0  93   0   0|   0    73M| 344B  420B|   0     0 | 586   105 
  0   7   0  93   0   0|   0    75M| 344B  420B|   0     0 | 629   177 
  0   7   0  93   0   0|   0    74M| 344B  420B|   0     0 | 600   103 
  0   7   0  93   0   0|   0    73M| 875B  420B|   0     0 | 612   219 
  0   8   0  92   0   0|   0    68M| 595B  420B|   0     0 | 546   374 
  0   8   5  86   0   0|   0    76M| 132B  420B|   0     0 | 632   453 
  0   9   0  91   0   0|   0    74M| 799B  420B|   0     0 | 596   421 
  0   8   0  92   0   0|   0    74M| 693B  420B|   0     0 | 624   436 


For my next test, I ran dd on 8 disks (sd[e-l]).  These are
non-system disks (OS is installed on sd[a-d) and they are split
between the 3Ware controllers.  Here are my results:

dd if=/dev/sd[e-l] of=/dev/null bs=1M

dstat

----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  0  91   0   0   1   8| 397M    0 | 811B  306B|   0     0 |6194  6654 
  0  91   0   0   1   7| 420M    0 | 158B  322B|   0     0 |6596  7097 
  1  91   0   0   1   8| 415M    0 | 324B  322B|   0     0 |6406  6839 
  1  91   0   0   1   8| 413M    0 | 316B  436B|   0     0 |6464  6941 
  0  90   0   0   2   8| 419M    0 |  66B  306B|   0     0 |6588  7121 
  1  91   0   0   2   7| 412M    0 | 461B  322B|   0     0 |6449  6916 
  0  91   0   0   1   7| 415M    0 | 665B  436B|   0     0 |6535  7044 
  0  92   0   0   1   7| 418M    0 | 299B  306B|   0     0 |6555  7028 
  0  90   0   0   1   8| 412M    0 | 192B  436B|   0     0 |6496  7014 

And for write:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[e-l] bs=1M

dstat

----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw 
  0  86   0   0   1  12|   0   399M| 370B  306B|   0     0 |3520   855 
  0  87   0   0   1  12|   0   407M| 310B  322B|   0     0 |3506   813 
  1  87   0   0   1  12|   0   413M| 218B  322B|   0     0 |3568   827 
  0  87   0   0   0  12|   0   425M| 278B  322B|   0     0 |3641   785 
  0  87   0   0   1  12|   0   430M| 310B  322B|   0     0 |3658   845 
  0  86   0   0   1  14|   0   421M| 218B  322B|   0     0 |3605   756 
  1  85   0   0   1  14|   0   417M| 627B  322B|   0     0 |3579   984 
  0  84   0   0   1  14|   0   420M| 224B  436B|   0     0 |3548  1006 
  0  86   0   0   1  13|   0   433M| 310B  306B|   0     0 |3679   836 


It seems that I'm running into a wall around 420-430M.  Assuming
the disks can push 75M, 8 disks should push 600M together.  This
is obviously not the case.  According to Intel's Tech
Specifications:

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/se7520bd2/sb/se7520bd2_server_board_tps_r23.pdf

I think the IO contention (in my case) is due to the PXH.

All and all, when it comes down to moving IO in reality, these
tests are pretty much useless in my opinion.  Filesystem overhead
and other operations limit the amount of IO that can be serviced
by the PCI bus and/or the block devices (although it's interesting 
to see if the theoretical speeds are possible).

For example, the box I used in the above example will be used as
a fibre channel target server. Below is a performance print out
of a running fibre target with the same hardware as tested above:

mayacli> show performance controller=fc1
        read/sec  write/sec IOPS      
        16k       844k      141       
        52k       548k      62        
        1m        344k      64        
        52k       132k      26        
        0         208k      27        
        12k       396k      42        
        168k      356k      64        
        32k       76k       16        
        952k      248k      124       
        860k      264k      132       
        1m        544k      165       
        1m        280k      166       
        900k      344k      105       
        340k      284k      60        
        1m        280k      125       
        1m        340k      138       
        764k      592k      118       
        1m        448k      127       
        2m        356k      276       
        2m        480k      174       
        2m        8m        144       
        540k      376k      89        
        324k      380k      77        
        4k        348k      71        

This particular fibre target is providing storage to 8
initiators, 4 of which are busy IMAP mail servers.  Granted this
isn't the busiest time of the year for us, but were not comming even
close to the numbers mentioned in the above example.

As always, corrections to my above bable are appreciated and
welcomed :-)

Bryan