Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 16:10:56 -0800 From: "Manjunath R Gowda" <mgowda82@gmail.com> To: "Nico -telmich- Schottelius" <nico-freebsd-performance@schottelius.org> Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Performance of disk i/o with 3ware Message-ID: <d0b92eea0711061610m38b01606td70c803ff1858d2f@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20071106193305.GJ15790@schottelius.org> References: <20071106122820.GA28254@schottelius.org> <d0b92eea0711060954i74ca514bu1d236367ec38ffd2@mail.gmail.com> <20071106193305.GJ15790@schottelius.org>
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On 11/6/07, Nico -telmich- Schottelius < nico-freebsd-performance@schottelius.org> wrote: > > Manjunath R Gowda [Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 09:54:09AM -0800]: > > On 11/6/07, Nico -telmich- Schottelius < > > nico-freebsd-performance@schottelius.org> wrote: > > > > > > Hello! > > > > > > I've the problem that sometimes there are many disk waiting processes > > > (sysctl -n vm.vmtotal), but systat -vmstat shows da0 and da1 busy with > > > 0-10%. > > > > I woudn't worry about how many are sleeping. But, How long they sleep > would > > be interesting data. > > And also why they sleep. Having about 700 processes in sleep state plus > 400 processes in diskwait state makes me wonder somehow. At a given time only few can run, remaining once will sleep which is an expected behavior. There are also some processes from cron, which are older and also in > state "I" (as shown by ps). You have to dig deep and see what those cron jobs do. > > I guess that the disk i/o is at about 100%, but wondering why I see > > > those strange values. > > > > Why do you think it should be 100%? Are you running any disk I/O intense > > application? > > Because it's the well known bottleneck in that server: > > - it has 4 cpus, which are about 30-50% idle > - it has 4 GiB ram, of which 2GiB is mostly inactive > - it has 4 10k rpm hds in 2 raid1 disk arrays, one for > the mailboxes + root and one for the qmail-queue > > Normally systat -vmstat shows 80-100% busy state on the disk arrays, > but currently it's at about 10%, which cannot be right. > > I think I'll have a look closer look at the patch we used from CVS to > patch the > 3ware twa driver. Looks like your blaming the twa driver based on your experience. OS is a complex piece of software and involves many components, scheduler, vm, scsi-stack, driver, problem could be any where in this. That's why specific data would be useful. Something like on 6.2 running x takes y and on 6.2+patch it takes z would be useful. > > Anyone an idea, > > > a) why systat -vmstat shows so small busy values? > > > b) how to debug it further? > > > > You can try experimenting with diffrent I/O loads to make sure that > there > > is a problem before start debugging it. > > There is a big problem, that even results in taking about 30 seconds > until the '220' messages comes from qmail when connecting via telnet > from outside to it. Your adding one more variable, network here. Verify that when you did cvsup the network driver was not updated. To summarise, what runs on the server: > > - qmail + patches => has /var/qmail/queue on it's own disk-array > - courier imapd > - vpopmail (pop3 auth) > - mysql (needed by vpopmail) > - clamd > - spamassassin > - Webmail (horde on apache) > > So it's mainly a customer mailserver, with nothing special installed, > which may have some load, but not in the way it's not explainable. > > So I'm still hoping somebody with similar problems reads this mail ;-) > > Sincerly > > Nico > > -- > Think about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). > http://nico.schottelius.org/documentations/foss/the-term-foss/ > > PGP: BFE4 C736 ABE5 406F 8F42 F7CF B8BE F92A 9885 188C > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFHMMFxuL75KpiFGIwRAoKxAKDjh7aN8n/b7B3YPqcdKuqMPv9CGACgsGuf > lI6wV4jUuP8GnUhd37oW/mQ= > =4Yn4 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > >
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