I'll give it a try. However, I did not see anywhere in the BIOS configuration of the 642 RAID adapter to enable writeback. It may have been mislabled cache accelerator where you can give a percentage to read/write. That aspect did not change the performance like the LSI MegaRAID adapter does.
Steve
On 8/9/06, Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 10:45:07PM -0700, Steve Poe wrote:
> Luke,
>
> I thought so. In my test, I tried to be fair/equal since my Sun box has two
> 4-disc arrays each on their own channel. So, I just used one of them which
> should be a little slower than the 6-disc with 192MB cache.
>
> Incidently, the two internal SCSI drives, which are on the 6i adapter,
> generated a TPS of 18.
You should try putting pg_xlog on the 6 drive array with the data. My
(limited) experience with such a config is that on a good controller
with writeback caching enabled it won't hurt you, and if the internal
drives aren't caching writes it'll probably help you a lot.
> I thought this server would impressive from notes I've read in the group.
> This is why I thought I might be doing something wrong. I stumped which way
> to take this. There is no obvious fault but something isn't right.
>
> Steve
>
> On 8/8/06, Luke Lonergan < LLonergan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >Steve,
> >
> >> Sun box with 4-disc array (4GB RAM. 4 167GB 10K SCSI RAID10
> >> LSI MegaRAID 128MB). This is after 8 runs.
> >>
> >> dbserver-dual-opteron-centos,08/08/06,Tuesday,20,us,12,2,5
> >> dbserver-dual-opteron-centos,08/08/06,Tuesday,20,sy,59,50,53
> >> dbserver-dual-opteron-centos,08/08/06,Tuesday,20,wa,1,0,0
> >> dbserver-dual-opteron-centos,08/08/06,Tuesday,20,id,45,26,38
> >>
> >> Average TPS is 75
> >>
> >> HP box with 8GB RAM. six disc array RAID10 on SmartArray 642
> >> with 192MB RAM. After 8 runs, I see:
> >>
> >> intown-vetstar-amd64,08/09/06,Tuesday,23,us,31,0,3
> >> intown-vetstar-amd64,08/09/06,Tuesday,23,sy,16,0,1
> >> intown-vetstar-amd64,08/09/06,Tuesday,23,wa,99,6,50
> >> intown-vetstar-amd64,08/09/06,Tuesday,23,id,78,0,42
> >>
> >> Average TPS is 31.
> >
> >Note that the I/O wait (wa) on the HP box high, low and average are all
> >*much* higher than on the Sun box. The average I/O wait was 50% of one
> >CPU, which is huge. By comparison there was virtually no I/O wait on
> >the Sun machine.
> >
> >This is indicating that your HP machine is indeed I/O bound and
> >furthermore is tying up a PG process waiting for the disk to return.
> >
> >- Luke
> >
> >
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
