Adaptec ASH-1233 and Solaris 10
Seems I have a little performance problem with the Adaptec ASH-1233 controller and Solaris 10. For what ever reason, the drives are falling back to MultiwordDMA mode 2 (bad mmmkay!). What is weird, on a fresh boot, I can start copying large files to the ZFS mirror that is on the ASH-1233. It starts out at 10M/s (using FTP from another machine). After a little while, it suddenly drops to about 6M/s, then a little while later it drops to 3M/s, then it drops to about 1M/s and then finally 150K/s and then starts timeing out.. In contrast if I FTP the same file to a zfs mirror that is not on that controller I get a sustained 10+ M/s transfer rate. So I went and downloaded bonnie to run on it intresting results:
ZFS mirror on the ASH-1233:
# ./bonnie
File './Bonnie.682', size: 104857600
Writing with putc()...done
Rewriting...done
Writing intelligently...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start 'em...done...done...done...
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
100 22989 90.5 1360 2.0 1591 2.6 3071 14.9 3905 2.7 124.8 1.3
Here is a zfs mirror using the onboard IDE controller test using bonnie:
# /home/bonnie/bonnie
File './Bonnie.900', size: 104857600
Writing with putc()...done
Rewriting...done
Writing intelligently...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start 'em...done...done...done...
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
100 33636 100.0 39261 33.5 115563 100.0 27222 100.0 229894 100.0 10663.1 186.2
See the difference? I sure do. Needless to say my next step is to export the zfs pools and swap the cables and see how that works. Hopefully it will give me some better performance. (No the machine is not really starved for horse power, it is a Dual Pentium III with 1.5 gig of RAM and 1.1 TB of disk space on it.
