7.0-Release and 3ware 9550SXU w/BBU - horrible write performance

[Boris Samorodov]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 09:50:23 -0800 (PST) alan bryan wrote:

> I've got a new server with a 3ware 9550SXU with the
> Battery.  I am using FreeBSD 7.0-Release (tried both
> 4BSD and ULE) using AMD64 and the 3ware performance
> for writes is just plain horrible.  Something is
> obviously wrong but I'm not sure what.

> I've got a 4 disk RAID 10 array.

> According to 3dm2 the cache is on.  I even tried
> setting The StorSave preference to "Performance" with
> no real benefit.  There seems to be something really
> wrong with disk performance.  Here's the results from
> bonnie:

> File './Bonnie.2551', size: 104857600
> Writing with putc()...done
> Rewriting...done
> Writing intelligently...done
> Reading with getc()...done
> Reading intelligently...done
> Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start
> 'em...done...done...done...
>              -------Sequential Output--------
> ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
>              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per
> Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
> Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec
> %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
>          100  9989  4.8  6739  1.0 18900  7.8 225973
> 98.5 1914662
> 99.9 177210.7 259.7

> Any ideas?  Anybody have one of these that's working
> with FreeBSD 7?

I had almost the same problem. The transfer rate was less that 10Mb/s
for raid-10. When a BBU arrived I thought my problems gone. Not that
at once. Firstly none changed. I tested many combinatins with no avail
(it lasted some hours). Then it so happed that I set StorSave
"Ballanced", cache "on" and marked (by an accident) the raid for
checking (or verifying... can't recall how it's named at the 3WARE
BIOS). The test has began, I stopped it. Rebooted the OS.

To my surprise after booting the transfer rate was quite good. BTW,
the test proceeded after booting... Maybe the card did not use the
cache while the battery was uncharged? Don't know (but noticed
"twa0: INFO: (0x04: 0x0056): Battery charging completed:" at dmesg).

Here it is now with WD RE2 1T disks:
-----
3ware device driver for 9000 series storage controllers, version: 3.70.05.001
twa0: <3ware 9000 series Storage Controller> port 0xc800-0xc8ff mem 0xf8000000-0xf9ffffff,0xfeaff000-0xfeafffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci4
twa0: [ITHREAD]
twa0: INFO: (0x04: 0x0029): Verify started: unit=0
twa0: INFO: (0x04: 0x003D): Verify paused: unit=0
twa0: INFO: (0x15: 0x1300): Controller details:: Model 9650SE-8LPML, 8 ports, Firmware FE9X 3.08.02.005, BIOS BE9X 3.08.00.002
-----
da0 at twa0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <AMCC 9650SE-8LP DISK 3.08> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device 
da0: 100.000MB/s transfers
da0: 953632MB (1953038336 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121571C)
-----
/dev/da0s1d                        902G     36G    794G     4%    /space
-----
btest% uname -a        
FreeBSD btest.ipt.ru 7.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #14: Mon Mar  3 18:27:26 MSK 2008     root at btest.ipt.ru:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BTEST  i386
btest% sudo dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 5.073393 secs (206681412 bytes/sec)
btest% sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/space/dd.file bs=1m count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 5.670188 secs (184927909 bytes/sec)
-----


WBR
-- 
Boris Samorodov (bsam)
Research Engineer, http://www.ipt.ru Telephone & Internet SP
FreeBSD committer, http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power To Serve