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SCSI Disk layer performance

DISCUSSION Xose Vazquez Perez 3 participants 3 messages Jan 22, 2004 – Jan 29, 2004 SCSI

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Quoted 2 lines · Christoph Hellwig

What kernel tree do you use? If you're looking for decent scsi performance use linux 2.6 or the SuSE/RH vendor trees. Stock Linux 2.4

                                           ^^^^^^

_Enterprise_ kernels, RHEL or SLES.
Fedora Core kernel is, more or less, a plain kernel.org.

I'm runnig RHEL 2.4.21-9.EL kernel and it's _much better_ than any 2.4.xx kernel.org. I could call it 2.5 because it's a mix of 2.4 and 2.6 ;-)

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Quoted 6 lines · Xose Vazquez Perez
Quoted 2 lines · Christoph Hellwig

What kernel tree do you use? If you're looking for decent scsi performance use linux 2.6 or the SuSE/RH vendor trees. Stock Linux 2.4

Quoted 7 lines
                                           ^^^^^^

_Enterprise_ kernels, RHEL or SLES.
Fedora Core kernel is, more or less, a plain kernel.org.

I'm runnig RHEL 2.4.21-9.EL kernel and it's _much better_ than any 2.4.xx kernel.org. I could call it 2.5 because it's a mix of 2.4 and 2.6 ;-)

The 2.4.21-9EL might have clever things backported into it, but it is still missing essential things that can make a difference in the block layer, like an anticipatory I/O schedule. My impression is that all 2.4 kernels use the Linus Elevator. That works well with moderate SMP loads, but it does not perform well on my large-ish Hardware RAID0 1.1Tbyte ext3 partition on a Power Vault 220S with a Dell PERC4 host adapter. The 2.6.1 does work a lot more better in that sense, giving me an average read of 90 Mbytes/sec as opposed to 60+somethingMbytes/sec I used to get before with 2.4.21-9ELsmp.

The new I/O schedulers (let alone driver maturity issues) are the way to go for maximum performance! I won't place -for the moment- a 2.6 on a production grade system, but in a couple of releases, I will put 2.4 in the museum :-) with respect to SCSI I/O performance.

Regards,

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--
George B. Magklaras

Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX Systems Administrator
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo
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Quoted 10 lines · George Magklaras

The 2.4.21-9EL might have clever things backported into it, but it is still missing essential things that can make a difference in the block layer, like an anticipatory I/O schedule. My impression is that all 2.4 kernels use the Linus Elevator. That works well with moderate SMP loads, but it does not perform well on my large-ish Hardware RAID0 1.1Tbyte ext3 partition on a Power Vault 220S with a Dell PERC4 host adapter. The 2.6.1 does work a lot more better in that sense, giving me an average read of 90 Mbytes/sec as opposed to 60+somethingMbytes/sec I used to get before with 2.4.21-9ELsmp.

Quoted 4 lines

The new I/O schedulers (let alone driver maturity issues) are the way to go for maximum performance! I won't place -for the moment- a 2.6 on a production grade system, but in a couple of releases, I will put 2.4 in the museum :-) with respect to SCSI I/O performance.

How does the anticipatory scheduler compare to the deadline scheduler on your system?

What types of IO are you doing?

-- Patrick Mansfield