Freebsd8.1 ZFS with mfi driver performance

[Borja Marcos]

On Jan 20, 2011, at 2:57 PM, jackie wang wrote:

> hello ,I have a question.Sorry I have google a lot and have no answer.
> I run freebsd 8.1 with zfs file system and mfi driver .
> And my problem is when the system started , the speed is fast ,but
> after one or two days the system began to slow .
> My server main used as a web server ,the ram is 8G.
> my uname -a output
> FreeBSD xxx 8.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE #0: Mon Dec 20 20:50:20
> CST 2010     root at VS001.vlongbiz.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/xxxCore
> amd64
> 
> 
> when the system slow there much mermory in wired status about 5GB, and
> the system begin to use swap.
> 
> So,my question is why the zfs slow . Please Help ,now the box is in
> production env.

Maybe you will want to check on the sister freebsd-scsi list.  Some users (me included) have seen some ugly issues at least with what Dell calls PERC H700 and H800 cards.

Check your console for something like this:

hi,
we keep seeing these timeouts when there is heavy writes to the mfi:
...
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6564 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6594 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6624 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6654 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6684 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009ce498 TIMEOUT AFTER 35 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009ce9e8 TIMEOUT AFTER 37 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cec08 TIMEOUT AFTER 38 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cc3a8 TIMEOUT AFTER 47 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009ceda0 TIMEOUT AFTER 31 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009ce9e8 TIMEOUT AFTER 46 SECONDS
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cda80 TIMEOUT AFTER 55 SECONDS
...
mfi1: COMMAND 0xffffff80009cd0f0 TIMEOUT AFTER 6624 SECONDS




Borja