Re: 3ware 9000 Controller Extremely Slow Performance

On Feb 28, 1:33 am, Whoever <nob...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, danielatdavesch...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Ive not much experience with such things; I have setup a RAID5 on a
3ware 9500S-MI8 controller using the cards utility. I have created a
reiserfs partition on this drive, i access via /dev/sda, installed
gentoo. The kernel contains the 3w_9xxx driver as well as PIIX ide
driver for my i875 intel board. My problem isn't one of functionality
but one of speed, it is painfully slow. I might note as well that this
is a 32bit pci card.

Here's what a hdparm -tT /dev/sda yields

/dev/sda
Timing Cached Reads: 60MB in 2.14 seconds = 20.06 MB/sec
Timing Buffered Disk Reads: 22MB in 3.12 seconds = 7.05 MB/sec

That does look slow, although you have not said what your targets (disks) are.

There is some information on 3Ware's site about setting up your system for
optimal performance, including such things as selecting the appropriate
scheduler.

One more thought: are you sure that the RAID array is not still being
initialized? This may take several hours to complete, during which time
the performance of your array will be reduced.

O yes, i have read and gone over all the tweaking that 3ware has on
their site and it is all currently negligible to performance, just
making it vary from 5-7 MB/sec. The array is initialized and in an
optimal state. The disks are Western Digital SATA 250GB drives, 4 in
the RAID5 array, one as a swap.

As per my second post in this thread, i went to create a unit on the
spare from the utility on the card but it offered no options about
storsave, im still investigating this and going to try and create a
unit on the controller through tw_cli where i can explicitly state the
storsave value on creation. Though this would be a pain b/c i would
need some kind of boot medium with tw_cli on it to recreate my unit, i
dont see why i cant do this through the utility (who's firmware was
updated to the latest earlier today)

cheers
.

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