HP DL380G6, smart array p410i very slow (hdparm -t)

[Liam Curtis]

Hello all,

I have 2 identical DL380G6 servers with 64GB RAM running Oracle Enterprise Linux x64 5.5 I am in midst of setting up for production use to run Oracle E-Business suite. While running some hdparm tests to measure throughput, I noticed that drive performance is poor. I have seen bunches of similar posts pointing to firmware updates and battery backed cache as solution, which I have tried to no avail.

hdparm -t /dev/cciss/c0d0p3

/dev/cciss/c0d0p3:
Timing buffered disk reads: 134 MB in 3.08 seconds = 43.46 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device


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Might not seem bad, but I have an older dl360g5 which blows it away:

hdparm -t /dev/cciss/c0d0p3

/dev/cciss/c0d0p3:
Timing buffered disk reads: 434 MB in 3.00 seconds = 144.59 MB/sec
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(null) (wait for flush complete) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

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Other notes:

1) have enabled write cache thru hpacucli
2) p410i has 512MB cache
3) cache settings are 75% write 25% read
4) have latest firmware on controller
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I tried doing a dd time test for write performance and accidentally hosed the filesystems, so leary of trying that again. Does anyone have any advice on what else to check or is hdparm perhaps not a good test?

thnx!

[Johan Guldmyr · Accepted solution]

Hi!

Doesn't oracle have a test utility for their db? I believe MS SQL has one.

How many disks do you have?
What kind of disks do you have? (type/model number)
Maybe there is something else wrong?
Checked the ADU-report?

Is this perhaps different between the servers?

Do not use hparm for disk I/O throughput test. hdparm is meant for IDE/SATA disks.

try i/o meter instead

how about block sizes etc on the disks/partitions?
(equivalent of diskpart in windows)

[Liam Curtis]

Well...I tried using Iozone, and it turns out the disks are plenty fast! (as in phew!)

You are correct in that hdparm is not the best util for this particular application.

Thanks for the assist!

[Liam Curtis]

Used Iozone as it was easy to install and run

[andy-x]

Ciao.
I use

time dd if=/dev/zero of=file1 bs=1M count=5000

This make 5Gb file.

I hope to be helpful.