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Date:      Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:05:38 -0700
From:      Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
Cc:        Howard Goldstein <hg@queue.to>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: [resolved, naively] Re: geom vs ich through ar device - benchmarks?
Message-ID:  <20070726060538.GA70793@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
In-Reply-To: <46A7F2C2.2090009@samsco.org>
References:  <46A4E8FA.6010403@queue.to> <46A7B3FB.7010504@queue.to> <46A7B7AF.6080308@samsco.org> <46A7BF8C.5020909@queue.to> <46A7F2C2.2090009@samsco.org>

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On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 07:02:58PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> You should be able to sustain at least 70MB/s on a single modern drive
> with SATA-1 or SATA-2.  If you're not getting that then something in the
> driver or the application is getting in the way.  Even with the, um,
> "problems" that SiI controllers are famous for, you should be able to
> sustain a decent data rate on a single drive.

Informative thread!  I decided to try the same exact test as the OP,
though I do not use ar or gmirror, on 3 different filesystems on 3
different disks (2 of the 3 disks are the same model though).  I thought
posting the results might be benefitial to readers.

Hardware (and shared interrupts):

ohci0: <OHCI (generic) USB controller> mem 0xd3003000-0xd3003fff irq 21 at device 2.0 on pci0
atapci1: <nVidia nForce CK804 SATA300 controller> port 0x9f0-0x9f7,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x970-0x977,0xb70-0xb73,0xd800-0xd80f mem 0xd3002000-0xd3002fff irq 23 at device 7.0 on pci0
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
atapci2: <nVidia nForce CK804 SATA300 controller> port 0x9e0-0x9e7,0xbe0-0xbe3,0x960-0x967,0xb60-0xb63,0xc400-0xc40f mem 0xd3001000-0xd3001fff irq 21 at device 8.0 on pci0
ata4: <ATA channel 0> on atapci2
ata5: <ATA channel 1> on atapci2

Disks:

ad4: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata2-master SATA300
ad8: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0 08.02D08> at ata4-master SATA150
ad10: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata5-master SATA300

Filesystems:

/dev/ad4s1d     451G     50G    365G    12%    /backup
/dev/ad8s1g     122G    1.1G    111G     1%    /home
/dev/ad10s1d    451G     50G    365G    12%    /storage

Filesystem tunables (tunefs(8)):

/backup and /storage use the following custom variables, while
/home uses the defaults:

tunefs: maximum blocks per file in a cylinder group: (-e)  8192
tunefs: average file size: (-f)                            65536
tunefs: average number of files in a directory: (-s)       256

sysctl.conf tunables:

# Increase VFS read-ahead from 8 to 16.  Slight performance increase.
vfs.read_max=16

Results:

[root@icarus ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/backup/ddtest bs=1m count=1000
1048576000 bytes transferred in 16.249101 secs (64531324 bytes/sec)

[root@icarus ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/ddtest bs=1m count=1000
1048576000 bytes transferred in 23.940996 secs (43798345 bytes/sec)

[root@icarus ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/ddtest bs=1m count=1000
1048576000 bytes transferred in 14.729852 secs (71187137 bytes/sec)

I tried changing the tunefs variables on /home (to match the other two
filesystems on other disks), but the I/O rate did not change.  A simple
chart documenting the difference between the drives in the above tests
likely explains the I/O speed difference:

 ad4: WD5000AAKS -- 7200rpm, 8.9ms seek, SATA300, 16MB cache
 ad8: WD2000JD   -- 7200rpm, 8.9ms seek, SATA150,  8MB cache
ad10: WD5000AAKS -- 7200rpm, 8.9ms seek, SATA300, 16MB cache

The WD2000JD is a 1st-gen Caviar SE drive, which means it does not have
a SATA300-capable controller.  It does not have the OPT1 jumper either,
which limits a SATA300 drive to SATA150.

There's no way SATA300 provides a 40% speed gain over SATA150, so the
obvious answer becomes the cache.  One should also keep in mind that
drive firmware revisions can also impact performance (StorageReview has
proven this many times), but I don't have drives of different firmware
revisions, so I can't compare that.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |




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