performance problem with amr driver and Perc 2/SC

Jesse Guardiani jesse at wingnet.net
Thu Nov 6 05:20:29 PST 2003


Howdy list,

I have a 500Mhz Dell PowerEdge 4300 with:

[7:22]jesse at chortos:[~]# uname -a
FreeBSD chortos.wingnet.net 4.8-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE #0: Fri Apr 11 12:59:08 EDT 2003     jesse at chortos.wingnet.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/CHORTOS  i386

[7:42]jesse at chortos:[~]# grep amr /var/run/dmesg.boot
amr0: <LSILogic MegaRAID> mem 0xf4c00000-0xf4ffffff irq 10 at device 13.1 on pci2
amr0: <Series 466> Firmware 3.00, BIOS 1.36, 16MB RAM
amrd0: <LSILogic MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
amrd0: 51834MB (106156032 sectors) RAID 5 (optimal)


And I think I'm having performance problems. I am running a
RAID 5 array with 5 18 Gb SCSI disks.

The disks have varying speeds and capabilities:

-------------------------------------------------------
Slot   SCSI ID  Model # or Serial         Brand/Model         Specs
----   -------  -----------------         -----------         -----

0 (orig)  0     DNES-318350 E182115 S     IBM                 Ultra 3 SCSI Wide (80 MB/Sec)
                P/N: 25L2142                                  18.2 GB
                                                              7,200 RPM

1 (orig)  1     DNES-318350 E182115 S     IBM                 Ultra 3 SCSI Wide (80 MB/Sec)
                P/N: 25L2142                                  18.2 GB
                                                              7,200 RPM

2         2     ST318203LC                Seagate/Cheetah     Ultra 2 SCSI Wide (80 MB/Sec)
                                                              18.21 GB (5.4ms seek time)
                                                              10,000 RPM

3         3     Dell P/N:                 Quantum/Atlas 10K   Ultra 3 SCSI (160 MB/Sec)
                JP-082YPV-12541-03R-00MB                      18.2 GB
                TN18J462                                      10,000 RPM

4         4      --BLANK--

5 (hotsp) 5     PN34L7404                 IBM                 Ultra 3 SCSI (160 MB/Sec)
                ECF24486                                      18 GB
                                                              7,200 RPM

8         8      --BLANK--

9         9      --BLANK--
-------------------------------------------------------


The problem is that this box is averaging the following,
according to tests with dd:

write             read
2.05 MByte/Sec    12.59 MByte/Sec

Here are the exact tests I run:

write test:

    sh -c 'time -h dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024'

read test:

    sh -c 'time -h dd if=tstfile bs=1024k of=/dev/null'

Each test is run seperately. I monitor CPU usage via top
in a seperate terminal and monitor `iostat -w 1` in yet
another terminal.

Here is the result of the write test:

    1024+0 records in
    1024+0 records out
    1073741824 bytes transferred in 498.681822 secs (2153160 bytes/sec)
            8m19.03s real           0.01s user              17.41s sys


CPU varied during this test, but I'd guess that I averaged
50% idle or more. This is typically what the dd process looked
like in top:

    45270 root     -18   0  2268K  1128K wdrain   0:03  3.16%  3.03% dd


Here is some of the iostat output I get during the write
test:

-------------------------------------------------------
      tty           amrd0              cd0              sa0             cpu
 tin tout  KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s  us ni sy in id
   0  227 60.05  41  2.38   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  56  0 42  2  0
   3 6142 53.31  49  2.53   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  26  0 16  2 57
   0  377 71.95  38  2.64   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0  7  2 91
   0  369 88.18  34  2.90   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0  5  0 95
   0  341 57.42  38  2.11   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0  5  1 93
   0 2285 58.48  42  2.37   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0 10  1 88
   0 2420 79.33  36  2.76   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   0  0  5  0 95
   0 2393 88.24  34  2.89   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   2  0  7  0 92
   0  337 58.29  42  2.37   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   4  0 10  0 86
   0  354 70.91  35  2.40   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   3  0  6  2 89
   0  419 50.91  44  2.17   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   3  0  6  0 91
   0   76 39.90  60  2.35   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  12  0 10  0 78
   0 1181 60.49  44  2.61   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  19  0 42  2 36
   0   76 96.00  31  2.88   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  40  0 49  0 12
   0 2629 68.82  39  2.60   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  35  0 13  2 51
   0  416 77.73  30  2.25   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0  9  0 91
   0 2509 88.77  26  2.23   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   1  0  5  1 94
   0  299 35.26  53  1.84   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   0  0  5  1 94
   0 2417 27.12  72  1.91   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   4  0  3  0 93
   0 2463 22.20  81  1.76   0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00  11  0 14  0 75
-------------------------------------------------------

Any ideas on why I can't throughput more than 3 MB/s?

Does it have anything to do with the fact that my disks
have different RPM speeds?

My 5400 RPM ATA laptop hard drive (~13 MB/Sec Read and Write)
gets better throughput than this RAID 5 array. Something is
very wrong.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
http://www.wingnet.net




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