From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030708 Description of problem: [ I meant to file this bug against the Public Beta since I do not (yet) have a "real" RHEL to test. Please relabel this bug as apropriate ] To evaluate switching our systems to RHEL ES, I installed the public beta (taroon) on one of our test machines (3 yr old ASUS MB, Athlon 700MHz, 512MB RAM) and a 3Ware 7410, running a RAID-1 over two 40GB IBM IDE drives. As the system performed generally sluggish, nonwithstanding that I run a beta version, I investigated. Turns out that the reason is abysmally low throughput on said 3ware RAID. This problem is specific to the enterprise kernel, putting a RH9 kernel there, and the throughput is ok and the system doesnt feel sluggish (same if I move the ide to the standard IDE port, even tho thats only UDMA-66) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install System on hardware 2.run hdparm -t /dev/hda 3. Actual Results: [root@taroon3 root]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 42 MB in 3.04 seconds = 13.82 MB/sec Expected Results: Throughput at around 35MB/sec, which is reachable using the standard RH9 kernel on the same box. Unless you tell me that there was a bug fixed in the release kernel (which I obviously cannot yet test) this is a show-stopper here. Additional info: [root@taroon3 root]# uname -a Linux taroon3.km3.de 2.4.21-1.1931.2.399.ent #1 Wed Aug 20 15:51:09 EDT 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux [root@taroon3 root]# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 2 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 704.953 cache size : 512 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 1405. [root@taroon3 root]# lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-751 [Irongate] System Controller (rev 25) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-751 [Irongate] AGP Bridge (rev 01) 00:04.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 1b) 00:04.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT8233/A/C/VT8235 PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:04.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 0e) 00:04.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 0e) 00:04.4 SMBus: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 20) 00:0d.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc 3ware 7000-series ATA-RAID (rev 01) 00:10.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 74) 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86c368 [Trio 3D/2X] (rev 02) 74
hdparm is the worst possible benchmarker; could you please use tiobench (tiobech.sf.net) instead ?
Created attachment 95898 [details] tiobench output, enterprise beta kernel
Created attachment 95899 [details] tiobench output, home-built enterprise-final kernel
Created attachment 95900 [details] Tiobench output, Fedora kernel
they all seem to achieve 33Mbyte/sec-ish.....
I have added 3 tiobench outputs, first of them is against the RHEL beta kernel, second is on a home-compiled RHEL final kernel, third is the Fedora Core kernel (that showed 35MB/sec on hdparm -t) Please be aware that I had to break the RAID, so its currently degraded. But the comparison is still acurate (same condition for all 3 tests) I do agree that these look much better than the hdparm output, in terms of throughput. However, CPU efficiency on bulk reads is much better on the Fedora Kernel, and what is probably being the killer in "subjectively felt system performance" is the exorbitant latency on sequential writes, compared to the fedora one. Any comments on that ? [and I am impressed by the speed of the response - never before have I seen a Bugzilla Mid-Air collision :]
well the average latency isn't that bad on first sight could you experiment with elvtune a bit? eg elvtune -r 8 -w 8 /dev/sda (or whatever device it is) elvtune tunes the balance between throughput and latency, which for RHEL is focused more on throughput by default
elvtune did not really help. The worst case figures for latency are still not much better. Even tho tiobench does not show that much difference between the various tests, whatever I do, the enterprise kernel looks to be slower. I do not know what impact the filesystem, caching, journaling etc have when testing witht tiobench, so this might distort the tests. And when it comes to transfer rate, I still do not see why tiobench would be a better benchmark than the following (other than Red Hat consider tiobench _the_ standard workload and optimized the kernel to show up best with this bench^H^H^Hworkload): (all repeated 3 times in a row, to account for caching, allways measured values varried only insignificantly) #Enterprise Kernel, 3Ware Raid: # time dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out real 0m28.458s user 0m0.030s sys 0m4.870s #Same Kernel, identical disk connected to on-board IDE-66 time dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out real 0m11.328s user 0m0.040s sys 0m5.420s #Fedora Kernel, 3Ware disk time dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=4k count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out real 0m11.305s user 0m0.110s sys 0m2.820s
The main reason why I prefer tiobench over that dd is that your dd goes to the raw device, which means the RHEL kernel won't try to do things like readahead etc etc while it will do that for regular files on a filesystem.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 104633 ***
An errata has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2004-188.html