Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 11 Nov 1998 08:51:52 +0100
From:      Bernd Walter <ticso@cicely.de>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [Vinum] Stupid benchmark: newfsstone
Message-ID:  <19981111085152.55040@cicely.de>
In-Reply-To: <19981111134546.D20374@freebie.lemis.com>; from Greg Lehey on Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 01:45:46PM %2B1030
References:  <199811100638.WAA00637@dingo.cdrom.com> <19981111103028.L18183@freebie.lemis.com> <19981111040654.07145@cicely.de> <19981111134546.D20374@freebie.lemis.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 01:45:46PM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> On Wednesday, 11 November 1998 at  4:06:54 +0100, Bernd Walter wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 10:30:28AM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> >> On Monday,  9 November 1998 at 22:38:04 -0800, Mike Smith wrote:
> > [...]
> > One point is that is doesn't aggregate transactions to the lower drivers.
> > When using stripes of one sector it's doing no more than one sector
> > transactions to the HDDs so at least with the old scsi driver there's no
> > linear performance increase with it. That's the same with ccd.
> 
> Correct, at least as far as Vinum goes.  The rationale for this is
> that, with significant extra code, Vinum could aggregate transfers
> *from a single user request* in this manner.  But any request that
> gets this far (in other words, runs for more than a complete stripe)
> is going to convert one user request into n disk requests.  There's no
> good reason to do this, and the significant extra code would just chop
> off the tip of the iceberg.  The solution is in the hands of the user:
> don't use small stripe sizes.  I recommend a stripe of between 256 and
> 512 kB.
That's good for random performance increase - but for linear access a smaler
stripe size is the only way to get the maximum performance of all disks together.
I agree - In general bigger stripes are better for Multiitasking Systems.

> 
> >>> There was an interesting symptom observed in striped mode, where the
> >>> disks seemed to have a binarily-weighted access pattern.
> >>
> >> Can you describe that in more detail?  Maybe I should consider
> >> relating stripe size to cylinder group size.
> >
> > I always saw the same and I'm shure that the cylinder groups are
> > mostly placed on one disk each.
> 
> I think you mean the superblocks.  It depends on the cylinder group
> size.  I haven't thought about this yet, but I may well do so.
You are right - I mean super-blocks and inode areas of the c-groups.

> 
[...]
> > I never checked if it's possible to do a stripe on differend sized
> > disks as ccd can do.
> 
> Do you mean 'different sized disks' or 'different sized subdisks'?
> Different sized disks are no problem, of course, but 'different sized
> subdisks' are.  I don't think that ccd could do this either; it would
> leave a hole in the volume.
> 
I mean 'different sized subdisks'.
CCD has the interleave description table for doing such things.
It' described in sys/ccdvar.h .
Say you have 3 100M subdisks and 2 200M Subdisks then CCD make a stripe
on the first 500M with all 5 disks and on the last 200M with the remaining both.

> > And ccd is more integrated into the rest of the system but the other
> > things are working at least as good as with ccd.
> 
> In which way is it better integrated?  It's available in exactly the
> same way as ccd (unless, like you, you want RAID-5 :-)
What I mean is - you edit /etc/ccd.conf and setup the partitions, ...
Finaly you place an entry in /etc/fstab.
You don't have to worry about loading an lkm or fsck, ...
Maybe I missed anything - but the last time I wasn't able to find any
point for vinum in any rc file.

> 
> Greg
> --
> See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers
> finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key

-- 
  B.Walter


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19981111085152.55040>