Hi,
We have a number of Sun SunFire V40z amd64 servers that were all bought
around the some time and have the same hardware. I have been involved
with a project that requires OpenBSD and I have been re-OSing then with
OpenBSD 4.1 (amd64 mp). I have a mystery that I have not been able to
figure out. The problem is the disk I/O is really slow and it pegs both
processors when doing heavy I/O. I spent weeks trying to figure out why
it was doing this but because of dead lines and because the end product
was a fw/router I ended up rolling one out to production and had used
another server running Solaris to do heavy disk I/O stuff. Now a few
months later I built a new one and it does not have the disk I/O issue
even though I installed it with the same boot cd and the same local copy
of the distro.
Since the hardware was the same I put the newly OSed drive in one of the
other servers that has the problem and to my surprise it still worked
great with no I/O issues. I have built a number of these systems and
only this magical one works right and doesn't have the I/O issues no
matter what server I put the drive in. I have spent some time trying to
see if I could find any difference between the two installs but
everything looks the same (file sizes, dmesg, etc). What could be
causing the issue? How can I constantly build servers without using dd
that doesn't have the problem?
Test:
For testing I used a tar ball I had laying around. It is 135M and has
9044 files in it.
Server that has the I/O issue:
bash-3.1# time tar -xzf mod_ssl-new.tar.gz
real 3m22.241s
user 0m1.440s
sys 0m1.750s
Server that doesn't:
bash-3.2# time tar -xzf mod_ssl-new.tar.gz
real 0m12.380s
user 0m0.330s
sys 0m0.810s
Thanks in advance,
Carl
