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Date:      Wed, 06 Sep 2000 00:29:06 -0400
From:      Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Vinum (was: RAID)
Message-ID:  <4.2.2.20000906000615.03226880@mail.sentex.net>
In-Reply-To: <20000906084835.B21113@wantadilla.lemis.com>
References:  <4.3.2.7.0.20000905165313.037652c0@marble.sentex.ca> <4.2.2.20000903213318.074039f0@mail.sentex.net> <4.2.2.20000903213318.074039f0@mail.sentex.net> <00090310375700.05988@www.runapplications.com> <4.2.2.20000904120154.07455bd0@mail.sentex.net> <20000905101653.A49732@wantadilla.lemis.com> <4.2.2.20000904204407.033e2920@mail.sentex.net> <20000905115126.A14470@myhakas.matti.ee> <4.3.2.7.0.20000905090105.053a13f0@marble.sentex.ca> <20000905155032.A27690@futuresouth.com> <4.3.2.7.0.20000905165313.037652c0@marble.sentex.ca>

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At 08:48 AM 9/6/2000 +0930, Greg Lehey wrote:
>Please make sure to use rawio in the tests.  Other things, such as
>bonnie and dd, give better looking results, but they're not very
>related to what happens in practice.

I will certainly take a look at it.  However, for now, I have been using a 
number of bonnie processes simultaneously.  The box I am building is going 
to be just a pop3 server. So at any given time, a number of popper 
processes running scanning through a users mailbox to see how many messages 
they have seems to be well enough approximated by a number of disk 
intensive processes like bonnie at once.

As for testing, so far so good.  Actually, I was quite taken aback by some 
of the results.  It really does seem a lot faster, certainly from the 
limited testing I have done. In one, test where I blast email at the box as 
fast as I can from two outside hosts, it took half the time deliver mail to 
13,000 user mail boxes as compared to the time it took on the 428 MegaRAID 
controller in a 3 disk striped config with the same physical drives 
involved. The other neat thing I have found so far, was that on a 256MB 
machine, comparing the amr, mlx, da, ad to the vinum drive, the vinum tests 
gave me the best even distribution of multiple processes blasting on the 
disk.  Running 15 bonnie -s 100 at once, all the drivers except vinum 
tended to favor the first and second process in terms of performance. vinum 
gave very uniform results across all the processes which I guess if I saw 
20 popper processes start up, all accessing big mail boxes, I would want 
each to get equal disk access!

The only problem I have run into so far is creating a 3 disk RAID5 
array.  Is this not possible ?

It *seems* to take the command OK (raid5 -v /dev/da0e /dev/da1e /dev/da2e), 
but newfs gives
newmail# newfs -v /dev/vinum/vinum0
newfs: /dev/vinum/vinum0: Input/output error
on a STABLE box from 2 days ago.

Am I better off in the end going with 4 drives in a RAID 10 config instead ?

         ---Mike
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Tancsa,                          	          tel +1 519 651 3400
Network Administration,     			  mike@sentex.net
Sentex Communications                 		  www.sentex.net
Cambridge, Ontario Canada			  www.sentex.net/mike



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