On Sat, 2012-03-24 at 01:08 -0700, Anton Cohen wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Conrad Wood <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>         on storage:
>         dd if=/dev/zero of=volume bs=1M : ~ 1,600MByte/s
>         cp file1 file2 : ~ 300MByte/s (both files on same volume)
>         
>         on server
>         dd if=/dev/zero of=volume bs=1M : ~ 1,100MByte/s
>         cp file1 file2 : ~ 30MByte/s (both files on same volume)
> 
> It's not clear to me whether of=volume is writing to the volume or a
> file on a file system, i.e., is it of=/dev/vol or
> of=/mountpoint/file1? To be a fair test against 'cp' you should have
> 'dd' write to a file, though the performance should be fairly close.
> Also I can't tell if they are direct/synced writes or not, so I'll
> assume not (sorry for assuming).
> 

quite true, sorry for the ambiquity on my side. of=volume refers to a
file on the volume.
Die direct option in the linux kernel isn't quite what I wanted, because
apparetntly it keeps only a single BIO in-flight at any time. (Which
matches my observation) That slows things down a lot of course and isn't
what 'cp' does. I issue a 'sync' command afterwards and calculate the
amount of bytes written & read between starting "cp" or "dd" and the
"sync" being finished.

> 
> Your 'dd' numbers look suspiciously high, like buffered writes to RAM.
> Whenever you want to test actual write performance with 'dd', not
> memory or dirty page performance, you need to do oflag=direct:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/point/file oflag=direct bs=1M count=1000

Actually it is a 24-disk raid array with pretty fast disks. I do believe
the numbers are correct for sequential(ish) read/writes. (each disk
delivers ~120MByte/s sequential, so the raid should theoretically give
2.8GByte/s. (even though the SAS bus cannot go quite as fast I believe)
> 
> 
> Unless you actually want to test writing dirty pages, and I have seen
> a kernel bug where flushing dirty pages was slow, but then you should
> also time a 'sync':
> time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/point/file bs=1M count=1000 && time sync
> 

Mostly I wonder if it is atall possible to get such speeds over QDR. Are
you in a position where you could perhaps run a  "cp" followed by "sync"
on an infiniband attached storage system?

_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators
 http://lopsa.org/

Reply via email to