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Date:      Wed, 24 Feb 1999 18:41:12 -0700 (MST)
From:      "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com>
To:        peter.jeremy@auss2.alcatel.com.au (Peter Jeremy)
Cc:        ru@ucb.crimea.ua, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Tagged queueing and write cache on WDE SCSI drives
Message-ID:  <199902250141.SAA42508@panzer.plutotech.com>
In-Reply-To: <99Feb25.121437est.40397@border.alcanet.com.au> from Peter Jeremy at "Feb 25, 1999 12:25:32 pm"

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Peter Jeremy wrote...
> Ruslan Ermilov <ru@ucb.crimea.ua> wrote:
> >I have tested all four combinations for Tagged Queueing (TQ) and
> >Write Cache option (WC).
> 
> Tagged Queueing is only relevant where a device has a number of
> outstanding I/O requests.  Since your test is single-threaded,
> it doesn't test TQ.

It may be single threaded, but since it goes through the filesystem, there
can be multiple outstanding I/O requests.  For instance:

I just did the following test:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.tmp bs=64k count=8000

And then, while it was going:

# ./camcontrol tags -v
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): dev_openings 1
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): dev_active 62
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): devq_openings 0
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): devq_queued 0
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): mintags 2
(pass0:ahc0:0:1:0): maxtags 255

There was nothing else touching that drive at the time.

The number of active commands is 62, which is pretty good.  The disk in
question is:

da0 at ahc0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
da0: <SEAGATE ST32155N 0318> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
da0: 20.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 15), Tagged Queueing Enabled
da0: 2049MB (4197405 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 261C)

It's on a 7880.

> For a realistic TQ test, you need to have a substantial number
> of processes performing I/O - unfortunately, I don't know of
> any suitable benchmark.  The `seeker' part of bonnie would be
> the closest.  An alternative would be to run a lot of dd's
> (maybe 20) in parallel.
> 
> >WC	TQ	MB/s
> >=======	=======	====
> >OFF	OFF	3.9
> >OFF	ON	4.2
> >ON	OFF	7.9
> >ON	ON	4.2
> 
> I would expect that enabling WC would improve write speed (which is
> what dd is testing).  I'm surprised by the impact of TQ: Since this is
> a single-threaded test, it should have negligible impact.  It almost
> looks like something is wrong with the TQ handling in the driver,
> controller or drive.

I think the problem is the way the Western Digital drives handle tagged
queueing.  From what Ruslan has said, and from what Andrew Gallatin has
said, I think the Western Digital drives probably perform best with tagged
queueing turned off, and write caching turned on.


Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken@plutotech.com


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