Greg Smith <gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Joe Uhl wrote: > >> Here is vmstat 1 30. We are under peak load right now so I can gather >> information from the real deal > > Quite helpful, reformatting a bit and picking an informative section: > > procs -----------memory---------- ---swap- ----io--- -system-- ----cpu---- > r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa > 0 34 95048 11025880 56988 15020168 0 0 3852 160 3616 8614 11 1 6 82 > 3 25 95048 10996356 57044 15044796 0 0 7892 456 3126 7115 4 3 8 85 > 1 26 95048 10991692 57052 15050100 0 0 5188 176 2566 5976 3 2 12 83 > > This says that your server is spending all its time waiting for I/O, actual CPU > utilization is minimal. You're only achieving around 3-8MB/s of random I/O. > That's the reality of what your disk I/O subsystem is capable of, regardless of > what its sequential performance with dd looks like. If you were to run a more > complicated benchmark like bonnie++ instead, I'd bet that your "seeks/second" > results are very low, even though sequential read/write is fine. > > The Perc5 controllers have a pretty bad reputation for performance on this > list, even in RAID10. Not much you can do about that beyond scrapping the > controller and getting a better one. Hm, well the tests I ran for posix_fadvise were actually on a Perc5 -- though who knows if it was the same under the hood -- and I saw better performance than this. I saw about 4MB/s for a single drive and up to about 35MB/s for 15 drives. However this was using linux md raid-0, not hardware raid. But you shouldn't get your hopes up too much for random i/o. 3-8MB seems low but consider the following: $ units 2445 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units You have: 8kB / .5|7200min You want: MB/s * 1.92 / 0.52083333 -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's 24x7 Postgres support! -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance