Re: Linux 2.6.29

Jesper Krogh
2009-03-25T18:46:34Z

David Rees wrote:
>>> writes. How fast is the array in practice?
>> Thats allways a good question.. This is by far not being the only user
>> of the array at the time of testing.. (there are 4 FC-channel connected to a
>> switch). Creating a fresh slice.. and just dd'ing onto it from /dev/zero
>> gives:
>> jk@hest:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdh bs=1M count=10000
>> 10000+0 records in
>> 10000+0 records out
>> 10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 78.0557 s, 134 MB/s
>> jk@hest:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdh bs=1M count=1000
>> 1000+0 records in
>> 1000+0 records out
>> 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 8.11019 s, 129 MB/s
>>
>> Watching using dstat while dd'ing it peaks at 220M/s
>
> Hmm, not as fast as I expected.

Me neither, but I always get disappointed.

>> It has 2GB of battery backed cache. I'm fairly sure that when it was new
>> (and I only had connected one host) I could get it up at around 350MB/s.
>
> With 2GB of BBC, I'm surprised you are seeing as much latency as you
> are. It should be able to suck down writes as fast as you can throw
> at it. Is the array configured in writeback mode?

Yes, but I triple checked.. the memory upgrade hadn't been installed, so
its actually only 512MB.

>
>>> On a 32GB system that's 1.6GB of dirty data, but your array should be
>>> able to write that out fairly quickly (in a couple seconds) as long as
>>> it's not too random. If it's spread all over the disk, write
>>> throughput will drop significantly - how fast is data being written to
>>> disk when your system suffers from large write latency?
>> Thats another thing. I havent been debugging while hitting it (yet) but if I
>> go ind and do a sync on the system manually. Then it doesn't get above
>> 50MB/s in writeout (measured using dstat). But even that doesn't sum up to 8
>> minutes .. 1.6GB at 50MB/s ..=> 32 s.
>
> Have you also tried increasing the IO priority of the kjournald
> processes as a workaround as Arjan van de Ven suggests?

No. I'll try to slip that one in.

--
Jesper