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Date:      Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:48:20 +0200
From:      =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Schmidt?= <sos@DeepCore.dk>
To:        Kevin Oberman <oberman@es.net>
Cc:        Bjoern Koenig <bkoenig@cs.tu-berlin.de>
Subject:   Re: poor ATA disk speed with ICH2
Message-ID:  <41409764.4040708@DeepCore.dk>
In-Reply-To: <20040909171404.CAC5B5D04@ptavv.es.net>
References:  <20040909171404.CAC5B5D04@ptavv.es.net>

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Kevin Oberman wrote:
>>From: "Bjoern Koenig" <bkoenig@cs.tu-berlin.de>
>>Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 12:29:03 +0200
>>Sender: owner-freebsd-current@freebsd.org
>>
>>Hello,
>>
>>first time I installed a beta of FreeBSD 5.3 I noticed very poor disk =3D=

>>speed.
>>I built a kernel without this whole debugging stuff; but it remains bad=
=2E =3D
>>I
>>supposed that this issue depends on further debugging features which I
>>didn't know. So I waited until UPDATING told that debugging options are=

>>removed from kernel and userland. Now I built a new kernel again and th=
e
>>disk speed is still unacceptable. Is there any further debugging option=
?
>>
>>Some facts:
>>
>>FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 without any debugging:
>>	per char write: 13.78 MB/s (32.7% CPU usage)
>>	block write: 13.97 MB/s (12.8%)
>>	per char read: 22.31 MB/s (45.2%)
>>	block read: 37.44 MB/s (14.8%)
>>
>>FreeBSD 4.10-STABLE:
>>	per char write: 37.29 MB/s (75.7%)
>>	block write: 36.91 MB/s (28.7%)
>>	per char read: 38.53 MB/s (80.4%)
>>	block read: 37.45 MB/s (10.9%)
>>
>>(tested with bonnie, atacontrol shows UDMA100 both)
>>
>>Controller: Intel 82801BA (ICH2)
>>Hard disk: Seagate ST380021A
>=20
>=20
> I had previously reported this. I did some testing with the assistance
> of Robert Watson and it appears that the issue is ATA. The thread had a=

> subject of "Disk performance under CURRENT" and was back in May.
>=20
> I plotted out the times for various sizes of I/O and
> the only real issue was with write. The per character speed should
> increase fairly quickly with increased I/O size and did for V4 and for
> reads. For writes, it started the same for short writes as these tend t=
o
> be CPU bound. But, for longer writes, the increase in speed is MUCH les=
s
> than it was with V4 write or for reads and throughput tops out at
> between 16 and 32KB transfers at something far below what I saw in V4.
>=20
> I was also hearing a LOT of disk seek operations that did not seem
> appropriate to me. (I did the testing with dd(1) in single-user mode.)
>=20
> FWIW, I did my tests on an IBM T30 which is a P4@1.8 GHz with ICH3
> support chips.
>=20
> Looking back at the history in my e-mail archive, I'm not certain that
> sos@ was copied. Ouch! Mea culpa!

I fixed a chip setup problem on the ICH* chips some days ago, its has=20
been committed to RELENG_5 as well. However it would normally be=20
harmless if the BIOS has set the mode (which it normally does).

Besides that, I know of no problems performance wise. Disk seek=20
operations during sequential access suggests that there is something=20
else going on simultanious to the test as the driver doesn't issue seeks =

without being asked to from the system.

-S=F8ren



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