gmirror on a very slow but new HP architecture

[Miroslav Lachman]

Ferruccio Zamuner wrote:

> on FreeBSD 6 and gmirror usually I get 50-60Mb/s with a pair PATA hds, 
> speed higher than 130Mb/s with gstripe on the same 2 hds.
> 
> Two weeks ago I've installed the new FreeBSD 7 on a brand new HP 
> Proliant ML110 (G4):
> 

[...]

> 2) Here are instead catastrophic access speed on single drive:
> 
> free# swapoff /dev/da0s1b
> free# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0s1b bs=8192 count=30000
> 30000+0 records in
> 30000+0 records out
> 245760000 bytes transferred in 254.051957 secs (967361 bytes/sec)
> 
> Look! Lower than 1Mb/s
> 
> Then I try to do the same write on the gmirror on da1,da2,da3 without 
> soft-update but with journaling:
> 
> free# dd if=/dev/zero of=/home1/test bs=8192 count=30000
> 30000+0 records in
> 30000+0 records out
> 245760000 bytes transferred in 68.658723 secs (3579443 bytes/sec)
> 
> It's about 3.5Mb/s

[...]

> I'll be glad for any info to make FreeBSD 7 to run faster than actually 
> on this machine.

Did you tried the same dd test with another OS (with some bootable live 
CD of Linux)?

It may be caused by bad disk controller / bad cables.

Miroslav Lachman