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Date:      Mon, 30 Oct 2000 13:09:36 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        "Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Vinum performance (was: RAID on the cheap)
Message-ID:  <20001030130936.C37379@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <39FC34A9.6F37372D@nasby.net>; from jim@nasby.net on Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 08:31:05AM -0600
References:  <200010290700.BAA51057@cs28120-135.houston.rr.com> <39FC34A9.6F37372D@nasby.net>

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On Sunday, 29 October 2000 at  8:31:05 -0600, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> Zdenko Tomasic wrote:
>>
>> I  would normally prefer scsi setup which would be better, but cost is
>> the issue here. What would be recommended as an adequate CPU? PIII-733?
>
> My brother just asked me the same basic question, so I ran a test:
>
> tar -cf /dev/null /usr &
>
> While this was running, I kept an eye on top and couldn't discern any
> increase in the cpu useage reported by the vinum process:
>
> root  18  0.0  0.0  592  8 ??  DLs  Wed09PM  0:00.01 vinum: vinum daemon (vinum)

The Vinum daemon normally doesn't do anything.  It's just there to
handle configuration updates and error recovery.

> tar was showing ~10% of a CPU. This box is a dual PII-375 with 4 9G
> 10kRPM U2W drives in a raid-5 configuration with softupdates enabled.
>
> Watching the vmstat page of systat, the disks were doing ~100 TPS and
> about 600kB/s. This obviously seemed a bit low.

tar's not necessarily a good example.  Depending on what's on your
drives, you may spend most of your time seeking.

> Running tar -cf ~/usr.tar /usr shows tar using about 10% of a cpu
> (system and interrupt combined are less than 10%, according to top), tps
> are down to ~75, but the drives are now doing 1.5-2.5MB/s. Still not
> getting the full potential (the drives are seeking their brains out...
> /home is a different filesystem that /usr, but they're both raid-5
> volumes on the same set of drives).

The speed discrepancy would suggest that you're tarring files of
different size.  You'd expect this to be slower than to /dev/null.

Greg
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