From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Sep 5 21:34:30 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from cage.simianscience.com (cage.simianscience.com [64.7.134.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2EBF437B422 for ; Tue, 5 Sep 2000 21:34:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from chimp (chimp [192.168.0.2]) by cage.simianscience.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e864YGV30891; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 00:34:17 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from mike@sentex.net) Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000906000615.03226880@mail.sentex.net> X-Sender: mdtancsa@mail.sentex.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 00:29:06 -0400 To: Greg Lehey From: Mike Tancsa Subject: Re: Vinum (was: RAID) Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <20000906084835.B21113@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <4.3.2.7.0.20000905165313.037652c0@marble.sentex.ca> <4.2.2.20000903213318.074039f0@mail.sentex.net> <4.2.2.20000903213318.074039f0@mail.sentex.net> <00090310375700.05988@www.runapplications.com> <4.2.2.20000904120154.07455bd0@mail.sentex.net> <20000905101653.A49732@wantadilla.lemis.com> <4.2.2.20000904204407.033e2920@mail.sentex.net> <20000905115126.A14470@myhakas.matti.ee> <4.3.2.7.0.20000905090105.053a13f0@marble.sentex.ca> <20000905155032.A27690@futuresouth.com> <4.3.2.7.0.20000905165313.037652c0@marble.sentex.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 08:48 AM 9/6/2000 +0930, Greg Lehey wrote: >Please make sure to use rawio in the tests. Other things, such as >bonnie and dd, give better looking results, but they're not very >related to what happens in practice. I will certainly take a look at it. However, for now, I have been using a number of bonnie processes simultaneously. The box I am building is going to be just a pop3 server. So at any given time, a number of popper processes running scanning through a users mailbox to see how many messages they have seems to be well enough approximated by a number of disk intensive processes like bonnie at once. As for testing, so far so good. Actually, I was quite taken aback by some of the results. It really does seem a lot faster, certainly from the limited testing I have done. In one, test where I blast email at the box as fast as I can from two outside hosts, it took half the time deliver mail to 13,000 user mail boxes as compared to the time it took on the 428 MegaRAID controller in a 3 disk striped config with the same physical drives involved. The other neat thing I have found so far, was that on a 256MB machine, comparing the amr, mlx, da, ad to the vinum drive, the vinum tests gave me the best even distribution of multiple processes blasting on the disk. Running 15 bonnie -s 100 at once, all the drivers except vinum tended to favor the first and second process in terms of performance. vinum gave very uniform results across all the processes which I guess if I saw 20 popper processes start up, all accessing big mail boxes, I would want each to get equal disk access! The only problem I have run into so far is creating a 3 disk RAID5 array. Is this not possible ? It *seems* to take the command OK (raid5 -v /dev/da0e /dev/da1e /dev/da2e), but newfs gives newmail# newfs -v /dev/vinum/vinum0 newfs: /dev/vinum/vinum0: Input/output error on a STABLE box from 2 days ago. Am I better off in the end going with 4 drives in a RAID 10 config instead ? ---Mike -------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Tancsa, tel +1 519 651 3400 Network Administration, mike@sentex.net Sentex Communications www.sentex.net Cambridge, Ontario Canada www.sentex.net/mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message