Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:39:57 -0800 From: Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net> To: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: geom_stripe and Performance Message-ID: <438F518D.4000105@mykitchentable.net>
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When using FBSD 4.x, I used vinum to stripe my /usr across two drives. Performance seemed good but I never used any tools to actually measure it. Now I've upgraded to 5.4 (and will upgrade to 6.0 soon) and disk performance doesn't seem very good. When upgrading to 5.4, I ditched vinum in favor of geom_stripe as that seemed to be the way to go from my reading on the lists. My box is a small personal server I use in my home. It provides mail services, personal web space, etc but is not heavily used. The box has two 9GB SCSI drives in it. I set it up with a 500 MB root partition on one drive, 500 MB swap on the other, and then built the /usr stripe with the remaining space on both drives. Other partitions such are /var, /tmp, /home, etc. are symlinked to /usr/var, /usr/tmp, /usr/home, etc. as described in The Complete FreeBSD 3rd edition. When I created the vinum stripes, I followed instructions in the vinum man pages and docs at http://vinum.org. As I recall, those docs suggested a large stripe size that was not a power of 2 to reduce seeking. 'man tuning' also recommends a large stripe under the "STRIPING DISKS" section and suggests a stripe size of 1152 blocks. However when I created the geom_stripes using the instructions in the gstripe man page, I created stripes with a size of 128K as indicated in the example. Performance doesn't seem nearly as good as it did with the vinum stripe. However I don't really know how to test this. So does the recommendation of a larger stripe size from the vinum and tuning docs hold true for geom_stripe? Or is geom_stripe different in some way and the smaller stripe sizes are better. What are some recommended stripe setups for my situation? Thanks for your input, Drew -- Visit The Alchemist's Warehouse Magic Tricks, DVDs, Videos, Books, & More! http://www.alchemistswarehouse.com
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