Hi, The stride option will, or should, inform the MD driver of the number of blocks that will fit in the single RAID stripe. To be useful, you have to fdisk the partition as Linux raid (I am sure that you have done this already, as it is the only way to autodetect). I am not sure how you have set up your filesystem, since you mention ext3 slowing things down and then using mke2fs??? ext3 will not slow things down noticeably. I also don't know what type of disks and how many disks you are using, but 15 MB/s seems very slow. You have also not specified what RAID level you are using, so it is difficult to say what your performance should be (ballpark figure). Maybe you can post some more detailed specs, and then we can look into it more closely. But to answer your question, I have found stride option to make a huge impact in RAID 5 setups. Also, depending on what kind of system you are running, you may want to look into using the -T largefile (or some other) option, to let the filesystem reduce (or increase) the number of inodes that you have created. You should pay attention to the way that the RAID will be accessed most frequently, as you can use the many available options in mkfs and raidtab to your advantage to optimize your RAID for its particular purpose. Hope this helps, Cheers, Vlad. On Sat, 26 Oct 2002 14:35:58 +0200 (CEST) Mikael Abrahamsson (swmike@swm.pp.se) wrote: > >I had initial problems with a Promise SX6000 controller with the i2o block >driver and I also tried their source pti_st.o code but never got it to >compile. I emailed promise and got a response back quite quickly which >provided me with a new version of the source code version, plus beta >drivers they themselves compiled for redhat 7.3 and redhat 8.0 kernels. > >I have today started using the redhat 8.0 kernel driver and it seems to >work very well. Write performance is approx 15 meg/s to a 5 times 120gig >drive stripe (seems a bit on the low side if you ask me but that's ok >anyway, perhaps ext3 is slowing things down). I recommend anyone who have >problems with their SX6000 to do the same. > >I made the filesystem with just mke2fs -j and no raid options, is the >"stride" options anything I should use? Does it provide better >performance? (I tried finding some information on this, but the mke2fs man >page is so spread that all the search engines give me are copies of the >man page). > >-- >Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se > >- >To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in >the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org >More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html //-------------------------------------- Vlad Milovanovic vlad@webmail.co.za _______________________________________________________________ http://www.webmail.co.za the South-African free email service - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
