DL - 145 G3 - RAID 1 - VERY slow IO performance

[Jeff MacDonald]

Hi All,

Well I think the subject says it all.

Note: I took this machine out of the box, nothing more. so admittedly, I may have to get into the RAID bios... machine is in production now so I have to schedule that and use the KVM over IP.

I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 Server version, with a generic 2.6.22-14-server kernel.

My dmesg is here

http://www.bignose.ca/scratch/dmesg.txt

I have it configured with 2 250 gig SATA drives in RAID 1.

From what I gleen from the dmesg it's an LSI raid card ... "Fusion MPT SAS Host driver 3.04.04"

I also see lines like

[ 96.930143] ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0x80)
[ 101.733724] ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16)


And

[ 91.736361] scsi0 : pata_serverworks
[ 91.736472] scsi1 : pata_serverworks
[ 91.736722] ata1: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x00000000000101f0 ctl 0x00000000000103f6 bmdma 0x0000000000011c00 irq 14
[ 91.736823] ata2: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x0000000000010170 ctl 0x0000000000010376 bmdma 0x0000000000011c08 irq 15


Which is some what greek to me, but it looks like

1: The kernel is using pata_serverworks driver.. I thought if I denied this driver then the sata one would have a chance to take over... but it's remote and I don't want to do that till I bounce some ideas around in here..

2: ATA1/2 Are PATA... I guess this is still driver confusion.

I also noticed this line

[ 102.612721] sata_svw 0000:01:0e.0: version 2.2

Which I don't know if this one would replace pata_serverworks if I blacklistted pata_serversworks or not.

Finally... maybe I'm just screwed by this pseudo software "hardware raid" and need to install a supported OS like RHEL or SUSE.

PPS.. has anyone had success ripping the drivers out of the RPM's to just use with any distro and in this case will the RHEL drivers work with CentOS in case I don't want to pay for RHEL..

Phew. long winded... sorry.

[James ~ Happy Dude]

Hello Jeff,

Welcome to HP Forums.

Well, I don't have the answers to ur Queries. Just an FYI.

As you already know Ubuntu is not supported on this machine. Also, I haven't seen any users reporting anything similar to this. Did you try updating the Firmware n stuffs ? That may give u the difference in performance you are looking for.

Otherwise, the server performance on any supported OS should just be good. Also, point to remember is, this is an Entry level server; So do not set the performance benchmark tooo high !!

;-) Regards,

[Jeff MacDonald]

Hi James, thanks for the reply.

It may not be supported but it can be made to work and that's what I'll be doing.

Tomorrow night I am going to test blacklisting the pata_serverworks driver to see how that goes. My research indicates it should work.

I understand it's an entry level server, but when my desktop outperforms it by an order of magnitude [with less hardware], I'm not willing to accept that explanation.

Also, google reveals a decent number of people reporting similar performance lags, specifically on writing data with this setup.

[James ~ Happy Dude]

Sure :)
Let us know how it goes.

Regards,