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Date:      Thu, 7 Sep 2000 10:27:40 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>, Tim Tsai <tim@futuresouth.com>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Vinum (was: RAID)
Message-ID:  <20000907102740.B7718@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <200009052339.QAA03602@mass.osd.bsdi.com>; from msmith@FreeBSD.ORG on Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 04:39:48PM -0700
References:  <20000906084835.B21113@wantadilla.lemis.com> <200009052339.QAA03602@mass.osd.bsdi.com>

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On Tuesday,  5 September 2000 at 16:39:48 -0700, Mike Smith wrote:
>>> Just about to test and compare the same Atlas IV drives (QUANTUM ATLAS IV 9
>>> WLS 0B0B) usings a 2940U2 (aic7890/91) with vinum. I will post the results
>>> with the same three SCSI drives in the various adaptors in RAID5 (3 drive
>>> config) when done.
>>
>> 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.
>
> Rawio is largely a seek-time tester,

Correct.  That's the biggest issue in disk I/O.

> and not particularly representative of real-world I/O loads either.

It's reasonably close.  It could always be better, of course, and as
discussed I'm planning to write code to snapshot real-life disk
activity.  In the meantime, I think the current version is relatively
accurate.  What specific problems do you see?

> To get a feel for how a controller interacts with the buffer cache,
> you need to present the load via the filesystem.

No, you just need to present the same kind of load.

> I typically use a large number of bonnie processes (20 or so)
> working with large datasets (1-10GB) and then ignore their output
> and instead monitor the controller's throughput using devstat.
> Other filesystem load generators are probably worth considering as
> well, since bonnie's I/O patterns are not very imaginiative.

Nor are they particularly representative of real-world I/O loads :-)
In addition, monitoring devstat output requires a lot of
interpretation.

Greg
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