Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (A

2008-08-13 Thread Shaky
I used BCwipe to zero the drives. How do you:

boot Knoppix again and zero out the start and end sectors manually (erasing all 
GPT data)

??

thanks
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (A

2008-08-13 Thread Shaky
Oh, Jeff's write script gives around 60MB/s IIRC.
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (A

2008-08-13 Thread Shaky
Did you ever figure this out?

I have the same hardware: Intel DG33TL motherboard with Intel gigabit nic and 
ICH9R but with Hitachi 1TB drives.

I'm getting 2MB/s write speeds.

I've tried the zeroing out trick. No luck.

Network is fine. Disks are fine, the write at around 50MB/s when formatted with 
ext3 under Linux.
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (A

2008-04-20 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Hi,

First of all, my apologies for some of my posts appearing 2 or even 3 times 
here, the forum seems to be acting up, and although I received a Java exception 
for those double postings and they never appeared yesterday, apparently they 
still made it through eventually.

Back on topic: I fruitlessly tried to extract higher write speeds from the 
Seagate drives using an Addonics Silicon Image 3124 based SATA controller. I 
got exactly the same 21 MB/s for each drive (booted from a Knoppix cd).

I was planning on contacting Seagate support about this, but in the mean time I 
absolutely had to start using this system, even if it meant low write speeds. 
So I installed Solaris on a 1GB CF card and wanted to start configuring ZFS. I 
noticed that the first SATA disk was still shown with a different label by the 
"format" command (see my other post somewhere here). I tried to get rid of all 
disk labels (unsuccessfully), so I decided to boot Knoppix again and zero out 
the start and end sectors manually (erasing all GPT data).

Back to Solaris. I ran "zpool create tank raidz c1t0d0 c1t1d0 c1t2d0" and tried 
a dd while monitoring with iostat -xn 1 to see the effect of not having a slice 
as part of the zpool (write cache etc). I was seeing write speeds in excess of 
50MB/s per drive! Whoa! I didn't understand this at all, because 5 minutes 
earlier I couldn't get more than 21MB/s in Linux using block sizes up to 
1048576 bytes. How could this be?

I decided to destroy the zpool and try to dd from Linux once more. This is when 
my jaw dropped to the floor:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096
^[250916+0 records in
250915+0 records out
1027747840 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 10.0172 s, 103 MB/s

Finally, the write speed one should expect from these drives, according to 
various reviews around the web.

I still get a healthy 52MB/s at the end of the disk:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 seek=18300
dd: writing `/dev/sda': No space left on device
143647+0 records in
143646+0 records out
588374016 bytes (588 MB) copied, 11.2223 s, 52.4 MB/s

But how is it possible that I didn't get these speeds earlier? This may be part 
of the explanation:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=2048
101909+0 records in
101909+0 records out
208709632 bytes (209 MB) copied, 9.32228 s, 22.4 MB/s

Could it be that the firmware in these drives has issues with write requests of 
2048 bytes and smaller?

There must be more to it though, because I'm absolutely sure that I used larger 
block sizes when testing with Linux earlier (like 16384, 65536 and 1048576). 
It's impossible to tell, but maybe there was something fishy going on which was 
fixed by zero'ing parts of the drives. I absolutely cannot explain it otherwise.

Anyway, I'm still not seeing much more than 50MB/s per drive from ZFS, but I 
suspect the 2048 VS 4096 byte write block size effect may be influencing this. 
Having a slice as part of the pool earlier perhaps magnified this behavior as 
well. Caching or swap problems are certainly no issues now.

Any thoughts? I certainly want to thank everyone once more for your 
co-operation!

Greetings,

Pascal
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, michael schuster wrote:

> that's true most of the time ... unless free memory gets *really* low, then 
> Solaris *does* start to swap (ie page out pages by process). IIRC, the 
> threshold for swapping is minfree (measured in pages), and the value that 
> needs to fall below this threshold is freemem.

Most people here are likely too young to know what "swapping" really 
is.  Swapping is not the same as the paging that Solaris does.  With 
swapping the kernel knows that this address region belongs to this 
process and we are short of RAM so block copy the process to the swap 
area, and only remember that it exists via the process table.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread michael schuster
Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, A Darren Dunham wrote:
>> I think these paragraphs are referring to two different concepts with
>> "swap".  Swapfiles or backing store in the first, and virtual memory
>> space in the second.
> 
> The "swap" area is mis-named since Solaris never "swaps".  Some older 
> operating systems would put an entire program in the swap area when 
> the system ran short on memory and would have to "swap" between 
> programs.  Solaris just "pages" (a virtual memory function) and it is 
> very smart about how and when it does it.  Only dirty pages which are 
> not write-mapped to a file in the filesystem need to go in the swap 
> area, and only when the system runs short on RAM.

that's true most of the time ... unless free memory gets *really* low, then 
Solaris *does* start to swap (ie page out pages by process). IIRC, the 
threshold for swapping is minfree (measured in pages), and the value that 
needs to fall below this threshold is freemem.

HTH
Michael
-- 
Michael Schuster http://blogs.sun.com/recursion
Recursion, n.: see 'Recursion'
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, A Darren Dunham wrote:
>
> I think these paragraphs are referring to two different concepts with
> "swap".  Swapfiles or backing store in the first, and virtual memory
> space in the second.

The "swap" area is mis-named since Solaris never "swaps".  Some older 
operating systems would put an entire program in the swap area when 
the system ran short on memory and would have to "swap" between 
programs.  Solaris just "pages" (a virtual memory function) and it is 
very smart about how and when it does it.  Only dirty pages which are 
not write-mapped to a file in the filesystem need to go in the swap 
area, and only when the system runs short on RAM.

Solaris is a quite-intensely memory-mapped system.  The memory mapping 
allows a huge amount of sharing of shared library files, program 
text images, and unmodified pages shared after fork().  The end result 
is a very memory-efficient OS.

Now if we could just get ZFS ARC and Gnome Desktop to not use any 
memory, we would be in nirvana. :-)

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread A Darren Dunham
On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 10:28:45AM -0700, Richard Elling wrote:
> Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > I don't agree that if swap is used that performance will necessarily 
> > suck.  If swap is available, Solaris will mount /tmp there, which 
> > helps temporary file performance.  It is best to look at system paging 
> > (hard faults) while programs are running in order to determine if 
> > performance sucks due to inadequate RAM.  In many runtime 
> > environments, only a small bit of the application address space is 
> > ever needed.
> 
> swapfs is always there.  But, IMHO, it is a misnomer because it just uses
> the virtual memory system.

Why a misnomer?  "swap" and "virtual memory" are used as identical
terms in many places in Solaris.

But since /tmp was mentioned, perhaps you're referring to tmpfs instead
of swapfs?

-- 
Darren Dunham   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Technical Consultant TAOShttp://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?   San Francisco, CA bay area
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread A Darren Dunham
On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 12:16:11PM -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, Richard Elling wrote:
> >
> > Don't worry about swapping on CF.  In most cases, you won't be
> > using the swap device for normal operations.  You can use the
> > swap -l command to observe the swap device usage.  No usage
> > means that you can probably do away with it.  If you actually
> > use swap, performance will suck, so buy more RAM.
>
> I don't agree that if swap is used that performance will necessarily 
> suck.  If swap is available, Solaris will mount /tmp there, which 
> helps temporary file performance.

I think these paragraphs are referring to two different concepts with
"swap".  Swapfiles or backing store in the first, and virtual memory
space in the second. 

-- 
Darren Dunham   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Technical Consultant TAOShttp://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?   San Francisco, CA bay area
 < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Richard Elling
Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, Richard Elling wrote:
>   
>> Don't worry about swapping on CF.  In most cases, you won't be
>> using the swap device for normal operations.  You can use the
>> swap -l command to observe the swap device usage.  No usage
>> means that you can probably do away with it.  If you actually
>> use swap, performance will suck, so buy more RAM.
>> 
>
> I don't agree that if swap is used that performance will necessarily 
> suck.  If swap is available, Solaris will mount /tmp there, which 
> helps temporary file performance.  It is best to look at system paging 
> (hard faults) while programs are running in order to determine if 
> performance sucks due to inadequate RAM.  In many runtime 
> environments, only a small bit of the application address space is 
> ever needed.
>   

swapfs is always there.  But, IMHO, it is a misnomer because it just uses
the virtual memory system.

The prevailing method of determining memory shortfall is to observe the
page scanner (scan rate, sr).  But just for grins, try swap -l on your 
systems
and see if any pages have been used on the swap device.  The answer
usually surprises ;-)

> More RAM definitely improves ZFS repeated read performance due to 
> caching in RAM.  ZFS gives otherwise unused memory something useful to 
> do.
>
> Regardless, with a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit OS it seems like a crying 
> shame to install less than 4GB of RAM. :-)
>   

Yep, or if you do OpenGL stuff, like I've been doing lately, much more 
RAM :-)
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, Richard Elling wrote:
>
> Don't worry about swapping on CF.  In most cases, you won't be
> using the swap device for normal operations.  You can use the
> swap -l command to observe the swap device usage.  No usage
> means that you can probably do away with it.  If you actually
> use swap, performance will suck, so buy more RAM.

I don't agree that if swap is used that performance will necessarily 
suck.  If swap is available, Solaris will mount /tmp there, which 
helps temporary file performance.  It is best to look at system paging 
(hard faults) while programs are running in order to determine if 
performance sucks due to inadequate RAM.  In many runtime 
environments, only a small bit of the application address space is 
ever needed.

More RAM definitely improves ZFS repeated read performance due to 
caching in RAM.  ZFS gives otherwise unused memory something useful to 
do.

Regardless, with a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit OS it seems like a crying 
shame to install less than 4GB of RAM. :-)

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Richard Elling
Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
> I see. I'll only be running a minimal Solaris install with ZFS and samba on 
> this machine, so I wouldn't expect immediate memory issues with 2 gigabytes 
> of RAM. OTOH I read that ZFS is a real memory hog so I'll be careful.
>   

Memory usage is completely dependent on the workload.  Unless you
are doing a *lot* of writes with a slow back end (hmmm) then you
should be ok with modest RAM.

> I've tested swap on a ZFS volume now, it's really easy so I'll try running 
> without swap for some quick performance testing and use swap on ZFS after 
> that. This also takes away my fears about using a swap slice on the 
> CompactFlash card I'll be booting from.
>
>   

To save you some grief, please wait for b88 before swapping to
ZFS.

Don't worry about swapping on CF.  In most cases, you won't be
using the swap device for normal operations.  You can use the
swap -l command to observe the swap device usage.  No usage
means that you can probably do away with it.  If you actually
use swap, performance will suck, so buy more RAM.
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Richard Elling
Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
> Thanks a lot for your input, I understand those numbers a lot better now! 
> I'll look deeper into hardware issues. It's a pity that I can't get older 
> BIOS versions flashed. But I've got some other hardware lying around.
>
> Someone suggested lowering the 35 iops default, but I can't find any 
> information anywhere on how to accomplish this (not with Google, not in the 
> ZFS Admin guide either).
>   

It is in the Evil Tuning Guide.  But don't bother, it won't fix your
problem. The evidence suggests you get 10ms response even with
only 1 iop queued to the device.
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Thanks a lot for your input, I understand those numbers a lot better now! I'll 
look deeper into hardware issues. It's a pity that I can't get older BIOS 
versions flashed. But I've got some other hardware lying around.

Someone suggested lowering the 35 iops default, but I can't find any 
information anywhere on how to accomplish this (not with Google, not in the ZFS 
Admin guide either).

Greetings,

Pascal
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Great, superb write speeds with a similar setup, my motivation is growing again 
;-)

It just occurs to me that I have a spare Silicon Image 3124 SATA card lying 
around. I was postponing testing of these drives on my desktop because it has 
an Intel ICH9 SATA controller probably quite similar to the ICH9R (RAID 
support) in my Solaris box, but that 3124 may give completely different results 
with the Seagates. Test coming up.

(the forum seems to be having technical difficulties, I hope my replies end up 
in the right places...)
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
(the lt and gt symbols are filtered by the forum I guess; replaced with minus 
signs now)

# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
   0. c1t0d0 -DEFAULT cyl 45597 alt 2 hd 255 sec 126-
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
   1. c1t1d0 -ATA-ST3750330AS-SD15-698.64GB-
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
   2. c1t2d0 -ATA-ST3750330AS-SD15-698.64GB-
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Thanks, I'll try installing Solaris on a 1GB CF card in an CF-to-IDE adapter, 
so all disks will then be completely available to ZFS. Then I needn't worry 
about different size block devices either.

I also find it weird that the boot disk is displayed differently from the other 
two disks if I run the "format" command... (could be normal though, as I said 
before I'm new to Solaris)


# format
Searching for disks...done

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
   0. c1t0d0 
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
   1. c1t1d0 
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
   2. c1t2d0 
  /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci8086,[EMAIL PROTECTED],2/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
I see. I'll only be running a minimal Solaris install with ZFS and samba on 
this machine, so I wouldn't expect immediate memory issues with 2 gigabytes of 
RAM. OTOH I read that ZFS is a real memory hog so I'll be careful.

I've tested swap on a ZFS volume now, it's really easy so I'll try running 
without swap for some quick performance testing and use swap on ZFS after that. 
This also takes away my fears about using a swap slice on the CompactFlash card 
I'll be booting from.

Thanks!
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-19 Thread Marc Bevand
Pascal Vandeputte  hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> I'm at a loss, I'm thinking about just settling for the 20MB/s write
> speeds with a 3-drive raidz and enjoy life...

As Richard Elling pointed out, the ~10ms per IO operation implies
seeking, or hardware/firmware problems. The mere fact you observed
a low 27 MB/s sequential write throughput on c1t0d0s0 indicates this
is not a ZFS pb.

Test other disks, another SATA controller, mobo, BIOS/firmware, etc.

As you pointed out, these disks should normally be capable of a
80-90 MB/s write throughput. Like you I would also expect ~100 MB/s
writes on a 3-drive raidz pool. As a datapoint, I see 150 MB/s writes
on a 4-drive raidz on a similar config (750GB SATA Samsung HD753LJ
disks, SB600 AHCI controller, low-end CPU).

-marc

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Richard Elling
comments below...

Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
> Thanks for all the replies!
>
> Some output from "iostat -x 1" while doing a dd of /dev/zero to a file on a 
> raidz of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 using bs=1048576:
>
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  4.0 32.0  346.0 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.5  4.0 32.0  346.0 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.5  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  106.00.0 13567.5  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  135.00.0 12619.3  2.6 25.9  211.3  66 100 
> sd1   0.0  107.00.0 8714.6  1.1 16.3  163.3  38  66 
> sd2   0.0  101.00.0 8077.0  1.0 14.5  153.5  32  61 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   1.0   13.08.0   14.5  1.7  0.2  139.9  29  22 
> sd1   0.06.00.04.0  0.0  0.00.9   0   0 
> sd2   0.06.00.04.0  0.0  0.00.9   0   0 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0   77.00.0 9537.9 19.7  0.6  264.5  63  63 
> sd1   0.0  122.00.0 13833.2  1.7 19.6  174.5  58  63 
> sd2   0.0  136.00.0 15497.6  1.7 19.6  156.8  59  63 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  106.00.0 13567.8 34.0  1.0  330.1 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  103.00.0 13183.8  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
> sd2   0.0   97.00.0 12415.8  3.0 32.0  360.7 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd1   0.0   83.00.0 10623.8  3.0 32.0  421.6 100 100 
> sd2   0.0   76.00.0 9727.8  3.0 32.0  460.4 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13312.7 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13312.7  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13440.7  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.9 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.9  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13439.9  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  106.00.0 13567.6 34.0  1.0  330.1 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.6  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13311.6  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  120.00.0 14086.7 17.0 18.0  291.6 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7  7.8 27.1  336.4 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  107.00.0 13695.7  7.3 27.7  327.0 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  103.00.0 13185.0  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13313.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13313.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  115.00.0 12824.4  3.0 32.0  304.3 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  131.00.0 14360.3  3.0 32.0  267.1 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  125.00.0 14104.8  3.0 32.0  279.9 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0   99.00.0 12672.9  3.0 32.0  353.4 100 100 
> sd1   0.0   82.00.0 10496.8  3.0 32.0  426.7 100 100 
> sd2   0.0   95.00.0 12160.9  3.0 32.0  368.3 100 100 
>  extended device statistics 
> devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
> sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
> sd1   0.0  103.00.0 13183.7  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
> sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13439.7  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100
>
>
> Similar output wh

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Brandon High
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Bob Friesenhahn
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
>
>  > Thanks for all the replies!
>  >
>  > Some output from "iostat -x 1" while doing a dd of /dev/zero to a
>  > file on a raidz of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 using bs=1048576:
>   [ data removed ]
>
> > It's all a little fishy, and kw/s doesn't differ much between the
>  > drives (but this could be explained as drive(s) with longer wait
>  > queues holding back the others I guess?).
>
>  Your data does strongly support my hypothesis that using a slice on
>  'sd0' would slow down writes.  It may also be that your boot drive is
>  a different type and vintage from the other drives.

ZFS disables (or rather, doesn't enable) the drive's write cache when
it's using a slice. It can be manually enabled, however. The swap
slice on your first disk is what's limiting your performance.

>  SATA drives are cheap this days so perhaps you can find a way to add a
>  fourth drive which is at least as good as the drives you are using for
>  c1t1d0 and c1t2d0.

Using a separate boot volume with a swap slice on it might be a good
idea. You'll be able to upgrade or reinstall your OS without touching
the zpool.

-B

-- 
Brandon High [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The good is the enemy of the best." - Nietzsche
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
> - does Solaris require a swap space on disk

No, Solaris does not require a swap space.  However you do not have a 
lot of memory so when there is not enough virtual memory available, 
programs will fail to allocate memory and quit running.  There is an 
advantage to having a swap area since then Solaris can put rarely used 
pages in swap to improve overall performance.  The memory can then be 
used for useful caching (e.g. ZFS ARC), or for your applications.

In addition to using a dedicated partition, you can use a file on UFS 
for swap ('man swap') and ZFS itself is able to support a swap volume. 
I don't think that you can put a normal swap file on ZFS so you would 
want to use ZFS's built-in support for that.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Hi,

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately, all 3 drives are identical Seagate 
7200.11 drives which I bought separately and they are attached in no particular 
order.

Thanks about the /dev/zero remark, I didn't know that.

>From what I've seen this afternoon, I'm starting to suspect a 
>hardware/firmware issue as well. Using Linux I cannot extract more than 24,5 
>MB/s sequential write performance out of a single drive (writing directly to 
>/dev/sdX, no filesystem overhead).

I tried flashing the BIOS to an older version, but that firmware update process 
fails somehow. Reflashing the newest BIOS still works however. It's a pity that 
I didn't benchmark before updating the BIOS & RAID firmware package. Maybe then 
I would have gotten decent Windows performance as well. It could even be an 
issue with the Seagate disks, as there have been problems with SD04 and SD14 
firmwares (reported 0MB cache to the system). Mine are SD15 and should be fine 
though.

I'm at a loss, I'm thinking about just settling for the 20MB/s write speeds 
with a 3-drive raidz and enjoy life...

Which leaves me with my other previously asked questions:
 - does Solaris require a swap space on disk
 - does Solaris run from a CompactFlash card
 - does ZFS handle raidz or mirror pools with block devices of a slightly 
different size or am I risking data loss?

Thanks,

Pascal
 
 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Pascal Vandeputte wrote:

> Thanks for all the replies!
>
> Some output from "iostat -x 1" while doing a dd of /dev/zero to a 
> file on a raidz of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 using bs=1048576:
  [ data removed ]
> It's all a little fishy, and kw/s doesn't differ much between the 
> drives (but this could be explained as drive(s) with longer wait 
> queues holding back the others I guess?).

Your data does strongly support my hypothesis that using a slice on 
'sd0' would slow down writes.  It may also be that your boot drive is 
a different type and vintage from the other drives.

Testing with output from /dev/zero is not very good since zfs treats 
blocks of zeros specially.  I have found 'iozone' 
(http://www.iozone.org/) to be quite useful for basic filesystem 
throughput testing.

> Hmm, doesn't look like one drive holding back another one, all of 
> them seem to be equally slow at writing.

Note that if drives are paired, or raidz requires a write to all 
drives, then the write rate is necessarily limited to the speed of the 
slowest device.  I suspect that your c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 drives are 
similar type and vintage whereas the boot drive was delivered with the 
computer and has different performance characteristics (double wammy). 
Usually drives delivered with computers are selected by the computer 
vendor based on lowest cost in order to decrease the cost of the 
entire computer.

SATA drives are cheap this days so perhaps you can find a way to add a 
fourth drive which is at least as good as the drives you are using for 
c1t1d0 and c1t2d0.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R

2008-04-18 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Thanks for all the replies!

Some output from "iostat -x 1" while doing a dd of /dev/zero to a file on a 
raidz of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 using bs=1048576:

 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  4.0 32.0  346.0 100 100 
sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13312.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.5  4.0 32.0  346.0 100 100 
sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.5  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
sd2   0.0  106.00.0 13567.5  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  135.00.0 12619.3  2.6 25.9  211.3  66 100 
sd1   0.0  107.00.0 8714.6  1.1 16.3  163.3  38  66 
sd2   0.0  101.00.0 8077.0  1.0 14.5  153.5  32  61 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   1.0   13.08.0   14.5  1.7  0.2  139.9  29  22 
sd1   0.06.00.04.0  0.0  0.00.9   0   0 
sd2   0.06.00.04.0  0.0  0.00.9   0   0 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0   77.00.0 9537.9 19.7  0.6  264.5  63  63 
sd1   0.0  122.00.0 13833.2  1.7 19.6  174.5  58  63 
sd2   0.0  136.00.0 15497.6  1.7 19.6  156.8  59  63 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  106.00.0 13567.8 34.0  1.0  330.1 100 100 
sd1   0.0  103.00.0 13183.8  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
sd2   0.0   97.00.0 12415.8  3.0 32.0  360.7 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
sd1   0.0   83.00.0 10623.8  3.0 32.0  421.6 100 100 
sd2   0.0   76.00.0 9727.8  3.0 32.0  460.4 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13312.7 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13312.7  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13440.7  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.9 34.0  1.0  336.4 100 100 
sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.9  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13439.9  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  106.00.0 13567.6 34.0  1.0  330.1 100 100 
sd1   0.0  106.00.0 13567.6  3.0 32.0  330.1 100 100 
sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13311.6  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  120.00.0 14086.7 17.0 18.0  291.6 100 100 
sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7  7.8 27.1  336.4 100 100 
sd2   0.0  107.00.0 13695.7  7.3 27.7  327.0 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  103.00.0 13185.0  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
sd1   0.0  104.00.0 13313.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
sd2   0.0  104.00.0 13313.0  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  115.00.0 12824.4  3.0 32.0  304.3 100 100 
sd1   0.0  131.00.0 14360.3  3.0 32.0  267.1 100 100 
sd2   0.0  125.00.0 14104.8  3.0 32.0  279.9 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0   99.00.0 12672.9  3.0 32.0  353.4 100 100 
sd1   0.0   82.00.0 10496.8  3.0 32.0  426.7 100 100 
sd2   0.0   95.00.0 12160.9  3.0 32.0  368.3 100 100 
 extended device statistics 
devicer/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd0   0.0  104.00.0 13311.7  3.0 32.0  336.4 100 100 
sd1   0.0  103.00.0 13183.7  3.0 32.0  339.7 100 100 
sd2   0.0  105.00.0 13439.7  3.0 32.0  333.2 100 100


Similar output when running "iostat -xn 1":

extended device statistics  
r/sw/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device
0.0  103.00.0 13184.3  4.0 32.0   38.7  3

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (AHCI)

2008-04-18 Thread Robert Milkowski
Hello Pascal,

Thursday, April 17, 2008, 10:29:33 AM, you wrote:

PV> Hi everyone,

PV> I've bought some new hardware a couple of weeks ago to replace my home 
fileserver:
PV>  Intel DG33TL motherboard with Intel gigabit nic and ICH9R
PV>  Intel Pentium Dual E2160 (= 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo 64-bit
PV> architecture with less cache, cheap, cool and more than fast enough)
PV>  2 x 1 GB DDR2 RAM
PV>  3 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA drives

PV> Originally I was going to keep running Windows 2003 for a month
PV> (to finish migrating some data files to an open-source friendly
PV> format) and then move to Solaris, but because the Intel Matrix
PV> RAID 5 write speeds were abysmally low no matter which stripe
PV> sizes/NTFS allocation unit size I selected, I've already thrown
PV> out W2K3 completely in favor of Solaris 10 u5.

PV> I have updated the motherboard with the latest Intel BIOS (0413
PV> 3/6/2008). I have loaded "optimal defaults" and have put the SATA drives in 
AHCI mode.

PV> At the moment I'm seeing read speeds of 200MB/s on a ZFS raidz
PV> filesystem consisting of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 (I'm booting
PV> from a small 700MB slice on the first sata drive; c1t0d0s3 is
PV> about 690 "real" gigabytes large and ZFS just uses the same amount
PV> of sectors on the other disks and leaves the rest untouched). As a
PV> single drive should top out at about 104MB/s for sequential access
PV> in the outer tracks, I'm very pleased with that.

PV> But the write speeds I'm getting are still far below my
PV> expectations: about 20MB/s (versus 14MB/s in Windows 2003 with
PV> Intel RAID driver). I was hoping for at least 100MB/s, maybe even more.

PV> I'm doing simple dd read and write tests (with /dev/zero,
PV> /dev/null etc) using blocksizes like 16384 and 65536.

PV> Shouldn't write speed be substantially higher? If I monitor using
PV> "vmstat 1", I see that cpu usage never exceeds 3% during writes (!), and 
10% during reads.

PV> I'm a Solaris newbie (but with the intention of learning a whole
PV> lot), so I may have overlooked something. I also don't really know
PV> where to start looking for bottlenecks.


Check iostat -xn 1

Also try to lower number of outstanding IOs per device from default 35
in zfs to something much slower.

-- 
Best regards,
 Robertmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://milek.blogspot.com

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (AHCI)

2008-04-17 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Tim wrote:
>
> Along those lines, I'd *strongly* suggest running Jeff's script to pin down
> whether one drive is the culprit:

But that script only tests read speed and Pascal's read performance 
seems fine.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (AHCI)

2008-04-17 Thread Tim
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Bob Friesenhahn <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
> >
> > At the moment I'm seeing read speeds of 200MB/s on a ZFS raidz
> > filesystem consisting of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 (I'm booting
> > from a small 700MB slice on the first sata drive; c1t0d0s3 is about
> > 690 "real" gigabytes large and ZFS just uses the same amount of
> > sectors on the other disks and leaves the rest untouched). As a
> > single drive should top out at about 104MB/s for sequential access
> > in the outer tracks, I'm very pleased with that.
> >
> > But the write speeds I'm getting are still far below my
> > expectations: about 20MB/s (versus 14MB/s in Windows 2003 with Intel
> > RAID driver). I was hoping for at least 100MB/s, maybe even more.
>
> I don't know what you should be expecting.  20MB/s seems pretty poor
> but 100MB/s seems like a stretch with only three drives.
>
> > I'm a Solaris newbie (but with the intention of learning a whole
> > lot), so I may have overlooked something. I also don't really know
> > where to start looking for bottlenecks.
>
> There are a couple of things which come to mind.
>
>  * Since you are using a slice on the boot drive, this causes ZFS to
> not enable the disk drive write cache since it does not assume to know
> what the filesystem on the other partition needs.  As a result, writes
> to that disk will have more latency and since you are using raidz
> (which needs to write to all the drives) the extra latency will impact
> overall write performance.  If one of the drives has slower write
> performance than the others, then the whole raidz will suffer.  See
> "Storage Pools" in
> http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide.
>
>  * Maybe this ICH9R interface has some sort of bottleneck in its
> design or there is a driver performance problem.  If the ICH9R is
> sharing resources rather than dedicating a channel for each drive,
> then raidz's increased write load may be overwelming it.
>
> If you are looking for really good scalable write performance, perhaps
> you should be using mirrors instead.
>
> In order to see if you have a slow drive, run 'iostat -x' while
> writing data.  If the svc_t field is much higher for one drive than
> the others, then that drive is likely slow.
>
> Bob
> ==
> Bob Friesenhahn
> [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
> GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>
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Along those lines, I'd *strongly* suggest running Jeff's script to pin down
whether one drive is the culprit:






#!/bin/ksh

disks=`format &1 |
   nawk '$1 == "real" { printf("%.0f\n", 67.108864 / $2) }'
}

getspeed()
{
   for iter in 1 2 3
   do
   getspeed1 $1
   done | sort -n | tail -2 | head -1
}

for disk in $disks
do
   echo $disk `getspeed $disk` MB/sec
done

--
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (AHCI)

2008-04-17 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
>
> At the moment I'm seeing read speeds of 200MB/s on a ZFS raidz 
> filesystem consisting of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 (I'm booting 
> from a small 700MB slice on the first sata drive; c1t0d0s3 is about 
> 690 "real" gigabytes large and ZFS just uses the same amount of 
> sectors on the other disks and leaves the rest untouched). As a 
> single drive should top out at about 104MB/s for sequential access 
> in the outer tracks, I'm very pleased with that.
>
> But the write speeds I'm getting are still far below my 
> expectations: about 20MB/s (versus 14MB/s in Windows 2003 with Intel 
> RAID driver). I was hoping for at least 100MB/s, maybe even more.

I don't know what you should be expecting.  20MB/s seems pretty poor 
but 100MB/s seems like a stretch with only three drives.

> I'm a Solaris newbie (but with the intention of learning a whole 
> lot), so I may have overlooked something. I also don't really know 
> where to start looking for bottlenecks.

There are a couple of things which come to mind.

  * Since you are using a slice on the boot drive, this causes ZFS to 
not enable the disk drive write cache since it does not assume to know 
what the filesystem on the other partition needs.  As a result, writes 
to that disk will have more latency and since you are using raidz 
(which needs to write to all the drives) the extra latency will impact 
overall write performance.  If one of the drives has slower write 
performance than the others, then the whole raidz will suffer.  See 
"Storage Pools" in 
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide.

  * Maybe this ICH9R interface has some sort of bottleneck in its 
design or there is a driver performance problem.  If the ICH9R is 
sharing resources rather than dedicating a channel for each drive, 
then raidz's increased write load may be overwelming it.

If you are looking for really good scalable write performance, perhaps 
you should be using mirrors instead.

In order to see if you have a slow drive, run 'iostat -x' while 
writing data.  If the svc_t field is much higher for one drive than 
the others, then that drive is likely slow.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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[zfs-discuss] ZFS raidz write performance:what to expect from SATA drives on ICH9R (AHCI)

2008-04-17 Thread Pascal Vandeputte
Hi everyone,

I've bought some new hardware a couple of weeks ago to replace my home 
fileserver:
 Intel DG33TL motherboard with Intel gigabit nic and ICH9R
 Intel Pentium Dual E2160 (= 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo 64-bit architecture with less 
cache, cheap, cool and more than fast enough)
 2 x 1 GB DDR2 RAM
 3 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA drives

Originally I was going to keep running Windows 2003 for a month (to finish 
migrating some data files to an open-source friendly format) and then move to 
Solaris, but because the Intel Matrix RAID 5 write speeds were abysmally low no 
matter which stripe sizes/NTFS allocation unit size I selected, I've already 
thrown out W2K3 completely in favor of Solaris 10 u5.

I have updated the motherboard with the latest Intel BIOS (0413 3/6/2008). I 
have loaded "optimal defaults" and have put the SATA drives in AHCI mode.

At the moment I'm seeing read speeds of 200MB/s on a ZFS raidz filesystem 
consisting of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 (I'm booting from a small 700MB slice 
on the first sata drive; c1t0d0s3 is about 690 "real" gigabytes large and ZFS 
just uses the same amount of sectors on the other disks and leaves the rest 
untouched). As a single drive should top out at about 104MB/s for sequential 
access in the outer tracks, I'm very pleased with that.

But the write speeds I'm getting are still far below my expectations: about 
20MB/s (versus 14MB/s in Windows 2003 with Intel RAID driver). I was hoping for 
at least 100MB/s, maybe even more.

I'm doing simple dd read and write tests (with /dev/zero, /dev/null etc) using 
blocksizes like 16384 and 65536.

Shouldn't write speed be substantially higher? If I monitor using "vmstat 1", I 
see that cpu usage never exceeds 3% during writes (!), and 10% during reads.

I'm a Solaris newbie (but with the intention of learning a whole lot), so I may 
have overlooked something. I also don't really know where to start looking for 
bottlenecks.

Thanks!
 
 
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