rmt as a bottleneck - Was: Weird behaviour of AIT-3 and (g)tar

From: Tulio Guimarães da Silva (tuliogs_at_pgt.mpt.gov.br)
Date: 05/30/05

  • Next message: Bruce Evans: "Re: rmt as a bottleneck - Was: Weird behaviour of AIT-3 and (g)tar"
    Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 13:01:11 -0300
    To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
    
    
    

      Updates to an old problem. I´m splitting the original thread in 2,
    since there are 2 different questions, one of which I guess is for
    -hardware and the other, for -performance, then I´m x-posting this one.

      Here are other things I´ve been experimenting with... first, I´ll
    present the machines:
      - Omega: HP ML 110, 512MB RAM, 4x80GB 7200rpm SATA in RAID5 via
    HighPoint RR8120A, AIT-3 tape via Adaptec Ultra160;
      - Theta: HP DL 380, 1GB RAM, 6x72.8GB@10krpm SCSI in RAID5 via HP
    Smart Array 6i

      Here´s what I got:

    theta# /usr/bin/time -h gtar --atime-preserve --same-owner -cvpf
    omega:/home/teste /home/bkp/home/
    gtar: Removing leading `/' from member names
    home/bkp/home/
    home/bkp/home/bkp/
    home/bkp/home/bkp/rsh-vulcano.sh
    home/bkp/home/bkp/2005-01/
    home/bkp/home/bkp/2005-01/vulcano_2005-01-31.tar.gz
    ^Ctime: command terminated abnormally
            8m24.24s real 0.15s user 0.78s sys

    ... and then...
    omega# ls -laFG /home/teste
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 189020160 May 30 12:02 /home/teste
    omega#

    this gives me exact 375.040 Bytes/second. then I changed my approach:

    omega# /usr/bin/time -h rsh theta gtar --atime-preserve --same-owner -C
    /home/bkp -cvpf - home/ >/home/teste1
    home/
    home/bkp/
    home/bkp/rsh-vulcano.sh
    home/bkp/2005-01/
    home/bkp/2005-01/vulcano_2005-01-31.tar.gz
    home/bkp/2005-01/liam_2005-01-24.tar.gz
    home/bkp/2005-01/cache_www2005-01-29.tar.gz
    ^C 9m33.75s real 8.57s user 3m6.08s sys

    omega# ls -laFG /home/teste1
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 6396353720 May 30 12:35 /home/teste1
    omega#

      Observe that I bypassed rmt; that bumped the transfer rate to
    10.976.153,96 Bytes/s, almost 30x faster. Should this really happen?
    (And yes, I read rmt(8), but found nothing about this. :( ).
      Thanks for your help;

    Tulio

    Tulio Guimarães da Silva wrote:

    > Hi Gary,
    > ouch! That´s quite disappointing... :( We had already noticed this
    > kind of behaviour with DDS-* tapes, but we got some progress varying
    > the block size... and yup, I´m really using gzipped data. :S
    > For AIT-3, however, i thought this hardware compression was something
    > about using lower tape´s phisical-rolling speeds or alikes, but I
    > could never really find anything concrete about the methods... the
    > only one thing I found was they could use "variable block sizes", but
    > that´s all. Again, not many details. Anyway, I´m giving up the idea of
    > compression for now.
    > If something, I´m noticeing that (at least with -b 10) it becomes (a
    > lot) slower with time, but I guess this would be more of a question to
    > the -performance list.
    > Add: while writing this message, I remembered to check the 700V´s
    > "Product Specification Manual", and they mention something about
    > dual-partitions, but it seems something that needs to be implemented
    > at driver level, since it includes SCSI commands. In this case, I
    > would need to format the tape as a 2-partition one... any clue about
    > if and/or how that works on FreeBSD?
    > Thanks again,
    >
    > Tulio
    >
    > Gary Corcoran wrote:
    >
    >> Tulio Guimarães da Silva wrote:
    >>
    >>> Hello again,
    >>>
    >>> I´m having some trouble putting a Sony SDX-700V SCSI AIT-3 unit
    >>> to work on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE.
    >>
    >>
    >> ...
    >>
    >>> Besides the speed, hardware compression seems to not being
    >>> funcional either. I already tried every 4 possible dip switch
    >>> setting for compression, but I am still not able to transfer a 180GB
    >>> archive to a (should-be) 260GB medium.
    >>
    >>
    >>
    >> I can't help you with most of your problems, but regarding the
    >> "compression"...
    >>
    >> I would guess that if you have 180GB to backup, it's not all text. :)
    >> When I last used a tape drive years ago, when writing to a 2GB tape
    >> that would supposedly hold 4GB compressed, I could fit only about 1.9GB
    >> before the tape was full. Turning off hardware compression, I could fit
    >> 2GB. The problem was that I was saving already compressed multimedia
    >> files,
    >> and the tape drive's "compression" just added overhead and took up
    >> more space.
    >> So unless you're backing up text or similar files, don't believe the
    >> marketing hype about getting 2x the amount onto your tapes...
    >>
    >> Gary
    >
    >
    >------------------------------------------------------------------------
    >
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    >

    
    

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  • Next message: Bruce Evans: "Re: rmt as a bottleneck - Was: Weird behaviour of AIT-3 and (g)tar"

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