Re: Filesystem benchmarking for pg 8.3.3 server

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On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Henrik wrote:

But random writes should be faster on a RAID10 as it doesn't need to calculate parity. That is why people suggest RAID 10 for datases, correct?

I can understand that RAID5 can be faster with sequential writes.

the key word here is "can" be faster, it depends on the exact implementation, stripe size, OS caching, etc.

the ideal situation would be that the OS would flush exactly one stripe of data at a time (aligned with the array) and no reads would need to be done, mearly calculate the parity info for the new data and write it all.

the worst case is when the write size is small in relation to the stripe size and crosses the stripe boundry. In that case the system needs to read data from multiple stripes to calculate the new parity and write the data and parity data.

I don't know any systems (software or hardware) that meet the ideal situation today.

when comparing software and hardware raid, one other thing to remember is that CPU and I/O bandwidth that's used for software raid is not available to do other things.

so a system that benchmarks much faster with software raid could end up being significantly slower in practice if it needs that CPU and I/O bandwidth for other purposes.

examples could be needing the CPU/memory capacity to search through amounts of RAM once the data is retrieved from disk, or finding that you have enough network I/O that it combines with your disk I/O to saturate your system busses.

David Lang


//Henke

8 aug 2008 kl. 16.53 skrev Luke Lonergan:

Your expected write speed on a 4 drive RAID10 is two drives worth, probably 160 MB/s, depending on the generation of drives.

The expect write speed for a 6 drive RAID5 is 5 drives worth, or about 400 MB/s, sans the RAID5 parity overhead.

- Luke

----- Original Message -----
From: pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Fri Aug 08 10:23:55 2008
Subject: [PERFORM] Filesystem benchmarking for pg 8.3.3 server

Hello list,

I have a server with a direct attached storage containing 4 15k SAS
drives and 6 standard SATA drives.
The server is a quad core xeon with 16GB ram.
Both server and DAS has dual PERC/6E raid controllers with 512 MB BBU

There is 2 raid set configured.
One RAID 10 containing 4 SAS disks
One RAID 5 containing 6 SATA disks

There is one partition per RAID set with ext2 filesystem.

I ran the following iozone test which I stole from Joshua Drake's test
at
http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/04/is_that_performance_i_smell_ext2_vs_ext3_on_50_spindles_testing_for_postgresql/

I ran this test against the RAID 5 SATA partition

#iozone -e -i0 -i1 -i2 -i8 -t1 -s 1000m -r 8k -+u

With these random write results

       Children see throughput for 1 random writers    =  168647.33 KB/sec
       Parent sees throughput for 1 random writers     =  168413.61 KB/sec
       Min throughput per process                      =  168647.33 KB/sec
       Max throughput per process                      =  168647.33 KB/sec
       Avg throughput per process                      =  168647.33 KB/sec
       Min xfer                                        = 1024000.00 KB
       CPU utilization: Wall time    6.072    CPU time    0.540    CPU
utilization   8.89 %

Almost 170 MB/sek. Not bad for 6 standard SATA drives.

Then I ran the same thing against the RAID 10 SAS partition

       Children see throughput for 1 random writers    =   68816.25 KB/sec
       Parent sees throughput for 1 random writers     =   68767.90 KB/sec
       Min throughput per process                      =   68816.25 KB/sec
       Max throughput per process                      =   68816.25 KB/sec
       Avg throughput per process                      =   68816.25 KB/sec
       Min xfer                                        = 1024000.00 KB
       CPU utilization: Wall time   14.880    CPU time    0.520    CPU
utilization   3.49 %

What only 70 MB/sek?

Is it possible that the 2 more spindles for the SATA drives makes that
partition soooo much faster? Even though the disks and the RAID
configuration should be slower?
It feels like there is something fishy going on. Maybe the RAID 10
implementation on the PERC/6e is crap?

Any pointers, suggestion, ideas?

I'm going to change the RAID 10 to a RAID 5 and test again and see
what happens.

Cheers,
Henke


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