Very slow I/O performance on HP BL465c

[Boris Samorodov]

Nathan Le Nevez <nathan at lenevez.net.au> writes:

> I'm running 7.2-p3 on 2x HP BL465c blade servers, one of which performs very
> poorly. Both have the same RAID controller and 2 x 146GB 10k SAS disks
> configured in RAID-1. Both controllers have write-cache enabled. Both
> servers are running the same BIOS and firmware versions. Neither servers are
> running any services other than sshd.
>
> Blade with good performance (2 x Opteron 2218, 8GB RAM):
>
> ciss0: <HP Smart Array E200i> port 0x4000-0x40ff mem
> 0xfdf80000-0xfdffffff,0xfdf70000-0xfdf77fff irq 19 at device 8.0 on pci80
> ciss0: [ITHREAD]
> da0 at ciss0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> da0: <COMPAQ RAID 1  VOLUMES MOPK:>  AFPi xCePdU  D#i2r Leacuntc hAcecde!s
> s SCSI-5 device
> da0: 135.168MB/s transfers
> dSaM0P::  CAoP CPU #3 Launched!
> mmand Queueing Enabled
> da0: 139979MB (286677120 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 35132C)
>
> Blade with bad performance (2 x Opteron 2352, 16GB RAM):
>
> ciss0: <HP Smart Array E200i> port 0x4000-0x40ff mem
> 0xfdf80000-0xfdffffff,0xfdf70000-0xfdf77fff irq 19 at device 8.0 on pci80
> ciss0: [ITHREAD]
> da0 at ciss0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> da0: <COMPAQ RAID 1  VOLUME OK> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
> da0: 135.168MB/s transfers
> da0: Command Queueing Enabled
> da0: 139979MB (286677120 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 35132C)
>
> # dbench -t 10  1              2              3             4
> blade1          183.456 MB/sec 236.86 MB/sec  299.28 MB/sec  192.675 MB/sec
> blade2          6.97931 MB/sec 9.42293 MB/sec 10.2482 MB/sec 12.407 MB/sec
>
> Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated. I have run through all the
> Insight diagnostics tools and it fails to find anything wrong with the slow
> server.

The description of those blades at HP site says "HP Smart Array E200i
storage controller with 64MB read cache and optional battery-backed
write cache". Does both controllers have batteries? I've seen very
poor perfomance at RAIDs (with write cache enabled) without
batteries.

-- 
WBR, bsam