Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:22:26 -0500 From: "James R. Van Artsdalen" <james-freebsd-current@jrv.org> To: FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: SIIS/CAM driver performance Message-ID: <4A735282.8040502@jrv.org>
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I sent this to mav earlier but thought it would be of wider interest... My first attempt at measuring raw throughput with the SIIS driver (Silicon Image) got 875 MByte/sec with no tuning or changes to an old dual Opteron 244 (1.8GHz single core) Tyan K8W motherboard using two 3124 controllers and ten drives in four port-multiplier enclosures. I used 128KB blocks in the sequential reads since that's what ZFS seems to do by default. This same combo peaked at 375 MByte/sec with the ATA driver with my (badly done) hacks. SIIS appears stable. SIIS should clearly do better than 1 GByte/sec with modern hardware. One unknown is how well PCI-Express cards with the 3124 perform: the 3124 is a PCI-X part, and PCI-Express cards using the 3124 use the Intel 41110 Serial to Parallel PCI bridge which may add some overhead. mav has thrown down the GB/s gauntlet and we'll see which filesystems can pick it up. :-) This is exciting because it allows FreeBSD to be the OS of choice for cheap storage servers or perhaps even high-speed data capture. A 50 TB server should price well under $10k, a price/performance point hard to hit any other way. Issues: The Silicon Image 3132 is a native 2-port PCI-Express controller. but it appears to have problems as I am not aware of any driver on any OS capable of coaxing more than 150MByte/sec total out of it. The chip works but is very slow. Use the 3124 for performance. The SIIS driver doesn't support staggered spin-up yet. Anyone wanting to build a 50 TB storage array with SIIS needs to keep in mind that spin-up power spike for now.
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