Horrible Write Performance with Smartarray P400 in DL320, DL320s and DL1xx

[fschicker]

We are a small hosting company in austria and are using P400 controllers in about 20 HP Servers (DL 320(s), 160, 180)
Now, since more servers have mucher to do, we recognize very strange performanceproblems on writing to a logical drive
on the P400 Controllers even if the server is idle.

some tests we made, shows the performance problems:

OS: Debian Linux, we also tried 2.6.25 kernel and Ubuntu, CentOS and FreeBSD

Controller: P400 Rev 1 or 3, with BBWC and without, all with 256 MB Ram, latest FW or older (see detailed info attached from hpacucli controller details and hpaducli output)

Server: DL320 (FW Upgraded to latest Version with Firmware Maintenance 8.10)

if we make write stuff to the disk you can see the problem:

time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=1024k count=4000; sync"
4000+0 records in
4000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 325.159 seconds, 12.9 MB/s
real 7m49.905s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m12.121s
(you see, syncing needs also 2 minutes after dd has finished, after this the serverload is about 5, before 0.01)

we tried almost everything to find the problem, her is a list what we tried:

- updated p400 fw to latest version
- upgraded servers fw to latest version with fw-maintenance 8.10
- tried other linux distri
- tried other linux kernel (latest 2.6.25)
- other HP Server: we tried DL320s, DL320, DL160 and DL180
- tried other p400

Now we dont know what to do now, we have no more ideas how we could solve the problem :(

It would be very very very nice if anybody could help us with this issue!

Greetings from austria (the country without kangoroos),

Florian Schicker

[fschicker]

i could only attach 1 file.
heres the second.

[KarloChacon]

hi

read maybe can help you

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarrayp400/questionsanswers.html#5c

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01149818〈=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodSeriesId=3369549&prodTypeId=329290

regards

[peter buechel]

hi Florian,

did you solve your problem? I think we've the same prob. We exchanged the disks but it still remains. All driver/firmware is up to date.
I think about the Mainboard/Risercard/P400.
What slot do you uder for your P400. I use the only LP-Slot (should be No 6).

bye

[fschicker]

yes i did.

the problem seams to be a hardware problem with older p400 controllers. newer hardware revisions don't have the problem on most DL series servers. i didnt have the problem with the LSI Chips which begin with "6209xxx". 6208xxx are the ones which dont work.

but this solved the problem only for DL 160 and DL 320s, on our DL 320 the problems still occur..

conclusion:

dont use P400 on production servers where you didnt test it before. we tried to explain HP the problem for about 4 months, with no success..