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Date:      Wed, 8 Nov 2000 19:27:20 -0800 (PST)
From:      Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net>
To:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: disk I/O
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011081851080.1844-100000@yez.hyperreal.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10011081745020.11646-100000@shell.uniserve.ca>

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On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> You have an IO problem that leads to a cascade failure, basically
> everything starts piling up on the disks, 

Yep, that's basically what I'm seeing.

> I'd get a hardware raid system, they're a lifesaver for IO and
> reliability.

I.e., the conclusion is that my load is greater than what the hardware can
support; that's confirmed by:

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Tom wrote:
>   A 100tps average is about 10ms per transfer.  A good hard drive takes
> about 8ms average per seek.  Assuming every transfer requires a seek, you
> are not doing too badly.  However, tagged commands allow multiple pending
> IOs per disk.  If tags are disabled, or not functioning you will not get
> this benefit.  See camcontrol.

Tags are enabled according to camcontrol; and yep, these should be ~8ms
disks, so anything over 125 I'm getting the benefits of tagging.

Maybe what I'm looking for is a way to increase the amount of RAM cache I
can make available for disk accesses; what's the standard place to look at
for monitoring & tuning that?  Or is this something that it's better not
to touch, just let the OS figure out?  I ask because I don't appear to be
using all the RAM I've got available (based on the fact that I hardly ever
swap).

RAID is an option, of course.  I looked at Mike Tancsa's #'s for the 3Ware
driver and they were *quite* nice.  I was just hoping I'd get more out
of this current hardware.  No luck!

For the sake of completeness:

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Simon wrote:
> Is that machine using any swap when this happens? If so, that's most
> likely why. It tries to spawn processes, but can't do it fast enough.
> It happens on my box now and then. Running 4.1-R

Barely touches swap (according to swapinfo, as well as pi/po in iostat)

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Mike Tancsa wrote:
>   Also, mounting your disks with noatime (mount -u -o noatime /blah)
> requires no downtime and immediately improvement for a lot of things.
> Basically, it elimiates an IO to update the atime on files and
> directories.
>   Also, softupdates will be very helpful, but will probably require a
> reboot.

Using both softupdates & noatime.  =)

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

	Brian



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