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Date:      Fri, 15 Oct 1999 21:06:14 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Gerard Roudier <groudier@club-internet.fr>
To:        "Chris D. Faulhaber" <cdf.lists@fxp.org>
Cc:        Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>, "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>, scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 3.2 / Slow SCSI Dell PowerEdge 4300
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.3.95.991015204553.388A-100000@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910151109140.98623-100000@pawn.primelocation.net>

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On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Chris D. Faulhaber wrote:

> da0: <WDIGTL WDE9100 1.50> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
> da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)
> da0: 8683MB (17783204 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1106C)
>=20
> After enabling tagged queuing on this drive (by removing the quirk entry)
> and found performance about 10% slower.

What kind of performance are you measuring ? Tagged command queuing is
intended to improve _multithreaded IOs that is a lot more realistic IO
pattern than single-threaded sequential IO. I also read some decrease of
performance for DCAS for single-threaded sequential IO when increasing
number of tags. Unless, guys, you just want to eat the cake and to have
it, I donnot see any serious problem for these drives. May-be there is
some room for improvement in their firmware. They should _not_ have been
quirked to 0 tags, in my opinion, if the decrease of performance observed
is for sequential IOs. At most, user should be advised to use a
reasonnable number of tags or the quirk should have been more soft.=20

For the DCAS, the decrease of performances has been observed for
sequential write IOs that is a great stress for a disk when write behing
caching is enabled with tags enabled, but still nothing has been reported
for read and especially multithreaded read IOs. Castrating a disk model=20
regarding tags due to such unreaslistic results has been unserious in my
opinion.=20

When tags are enabled, the drive can overlap writes by disconnecting
previous to the data phase and so get rid of part of IO latency. In such a
situation, write behind caching can be disabled for some good disks
without significant decrease of performances, allowing drives to perform
more prefetching for read. Indeed, writing meta-data synchronously does
not help, but softupdate may do.=20

G=E9rard.



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