Dumb question

Is LVM faster when you don't compile it as a module ?

No.

patrick

As Patrick pointed out: no.

You can't almost measure LVM's impact on performance at all.
A different thing is the overhead implied when you take snapshots of logical volumes because there's additional writes for every write to the original logical volume necessary which degrades performance almost linear.

Regards,
Heinz    -- The LVM Guy --

*** Software bugs are stupid.
    Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them ***

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I build it into the kernel with the 2940 driver, reiserfs and the software raid (I don't like to have critical drivers as modules)

Stripped LV and NonStripped LVs reported the same bonnie++ result. Is it normal ?

I'm using 3 2.2 Gb SCSI drives on a 2940. One is for the system, the 2 others are for the LVM. I let the default stripe size, and the default PE size.

If you're doing striped LVs on top of software RAID I'm not really surprised. Pick one method of striping (LVM *or* RAID) and stick to it but don't mix them or who knows where your data will end up!

patrick

Software RAID is build in, but is not used. Nevermind !
I'm not using LVM on top of SOFTWARE RAID for the moment.
If I use LVM on top of SOFTWARE RAID, it will be for redudancy, not for striping.

My kernel is a 2.4.0 patched for the reiserfs and online ext2 resizing.

It isn't fatal to layer LVM striping on top of software RAID 5, but I don't think you would get better performance because of too much overhead from software RAID 5.

You could LVM stripe hardware RAID 5 as long as the LVM stripe size == RAID chunk size. For example, if you have a RAID array with 5 disks (4 data + 1 parity) and it is using 4kB chunks, then the LVM stripe size should be n*16kB so that you will write out a full RAID chunk at one time from LVM.

Cheers, Andreas

Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert

It would be a help to LVM users if you could do some simple performance testing with different LVM stipe sizes. With larger stripe sizes (64kB or so) you will likely get better sequential read/write performance, but I don't think the stripe size will affect random read/write performance.

Cheers, Andreas

Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert

Is there a ratio between stripe size and PE size ?