Re: [PATCH 00/19] Hardware Accelerated MD RAID5: Introduction

Dan Williams
2006-09-13T19:18:00Z

On 9/13/06, Jakob Oestergaard <jakob@unthought.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 04:00:32PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote:
> > Neil,
> >
> ...
> >
> > Concerning the context switching performance concerns raised at the
> > previous release, I have observed the following. For the hardware
> > accelerated case it appears that performance is always better with the
> > work queue than without since it allows multiple stripes to be operated
> > on simultaneously. I expect the same for an SMP platform, but so far my
> > testing has been limited to IOPs. For a single-processor
> > non-accelerated configuration I have not observed performance
> > degradation with work queue support enabled, but in the Kconfig option
> > help text I recommend disabling it (CONFIG_MD_RAID456_WORKQUEUE).
>
> Out of curiosity; how does accelerated compare to non-accelerated?

One quick example:
4-disk SATA array rebuild on iop321 without acceleration - 'top'
reports md0_resync and md0_raid5 dueling for the CPU each at ~50%
utilization.

With acceleration - 'top' reports md0_resync cpu utilization at ~90%
with the rest split between md0_raid5 and md0_raid5_ops.

The sync speed reported by /proc/mdstat is ~40% higher in the accelerated case.

That being said, array resync is a special case, so your mileage may
vary with other applications.

I will put together some data from bonnie++, iozone, maybe contest,
and post it on SourceForge.

> / jakob

Dan