is trhere a problem with the HP SmartArray P410 and/or Postgres on FreeBSD ?

[Ivan Voras]

On 04/13/10 22:30, Christoph Weber-Fahr wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> on a new HP Proliant DL385 G6 I have a P410 with BBWC and
> 8 hard drives in RAID5.
> (BBWC is Battery Backed Write Cache Enabler, and the controller
> is configured with 300M (75%) write cache).
> 
> One of the applications we want to run is PostgreSQL (not the top
> priority, else we would use a different RAID scenario).
> 
> But before getting the system live, we tested the performance.
> PostgreSQL gets a whole wopping 80 (!) tps out of this
> scenario wit pgbench ( -c 5 -t 5000)

Hmm yes, this is too slow.

> Now I had not expected top performance, but something to the tune
> of 500 tps should be well possible. And it's definitely a storage

Yes, your expectations are correct.

> or filke system issue, since CPU is bored to death during the
> benchmark, while the file system is at 100% according to systat.

> On a comparable Hardware our test machine runs as a VM under VMWare
> and gets ~600 tps.
> 
> Is there a known problem with this setup?
> 
> OS is FreeBSD-amd64 7.2-p7 .

Can you give more details about your hardware? CPU? Memory? File system?
The "100% sys time" point makes it possible it's not the storage itself
that is the issue.

You can also collect more information: I'd recommend with either "iostat
-x 1" or "gstat".