Re: 2120S poor performance

From: Jin Guojun [VFFS] (jin_at_george.lbl.gov)
Date: 12/09/04

  • Next message: Michael E.Conlen: "Re: 2120S poor performance"
    Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:49:05 -0800
    To: Mike Horwath <drechsau@Geeks.ORG>
    
    

    Mike Horwath wrote:

    >On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 11:51:21AM -0500, Bill Anderson wrote:
    >
    >
    >>I've got a 3x72g RAID5 array with U320 disks on an Adaptec 2120S
    >>controller under Freebsd 4.10. I'm getting about 25MB/s for sequential
    >>reads/writes (e.g. dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=32k). I've
    >>turned on write caching for the container (container set cache
    >>/write_cache_enable) and turned off the read caching, per previous posts
    >>to this list. I'm going to try setting hw.aac.iosize_max to 96k tonight
    >>to see if that helps. I'm currently using an IDE disk that gets about
    >>45MB/s, so I can hardly consider it an "upgrade" to switch to a 25MB/s
    >>U320 SCSI system. :/
    >>
    >>I've also read that the 2120S is slow because of its design. I'm trying
    >>to figure out whether the performance can be increased significantly (I
    >>saw a posting of a linux user getting 37.5MB/s, which although still slow
    >>might be acceptable), or if I'm better off getting a new card. I'm
    >>thinking the latter is the case based on previous postings, but since it
    >>will probably be quite expensive to replace it, I wanted to get some more
    >>data.
    >>
    >>What performance should I be expecting from a decent U320 RAID5
    >>controller?
    >>
    >>Has anyone gotten a 2120S to perform above 30Mb/s in FreeBSD?
    >>
    >>What's the cheapest controller that still gives reasonable performance?
    >>(If you could give a couple different ones, with their associated
    >>performance (under FreeBSD), or tell me where to find such information,
    >>that would be great)
    >>
    >>
    >
    >I know I left quite a bit of cruft above, but I don't see these kinds
    >of performance numbers you are seeing.
    >
    >First, SCSI does a lot with overlapping I/O and tagged queuing, only
    >the newest IDE (SATA) systems are starting to support such things.
    >
    >Second, SCSI disks run at a faster RPM most of the time (only the WD
    >Raptor hits the 10K mark), lowering seek time significantly.
    >
    >Third, my numbers:
    >
    >31MB/sec using
    >
    > dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=32k count=20000
    >
    >34MB/sec using
    >
    > dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=64k count=20000
    >
    >33MB/sec using
    >
    > dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=128k count=20000
    >
    I do not remember where the original problem of 2120s was posted.
    The read in RAID 5 mode is 40-56 MB/s, where write rate is 5-13 MB/s.
    The most problem is at writing to RAID, average around 8 MB/s.
    SCSI buses self is Okay because doing multiple R/W without RAID
    can get maximum disk I/O. Soft RAID, like Vinum, also slows down
    disk array performance. SO, it sounds like that RAID design has
    big overhead to kill the performance.

    dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=128k count=20000
    dev/null bs=128k count=20000
    20000+0 records in
    20000+0 records out
    2621440000 bytes transferred in 61.651078 secs (42520587 bytes/sec)

    Adaptec guy told me that this is a design issue. One older model,
    which may be out of market, is performing better, but I would not
    expect a large difference as soft RAID do not give better performance.

    -- 
    ------------ Jin Guojun ----------- v --- jin@george.lbl.gov ---
    Distributed Systems Department		http://www.dsd.lbl.gov/~jin
    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,	Berkeley, CA 94720
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  • Next message: Michael E.Conlen: "Re: 2120S poor performance"

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