Topic: Slow RAID installation on new mainboards...

[glenn-cns]

Has anyone else found that installing either e-smith 5.6 or 6 on new mainboards with software RAID is painfully slow?

We've never had a problem in the past - a newly installed e-smith is up and running in under an hour.

I've checked the hard drives (we're using IDE) and they're fine. In fact each drive installs fine by itself as a single-drive install, but when we select a RAID-1 install, it takes 5-6 HOURS!

I've tried different combinations of the drives as MASTER/SLAVE, Cable Select and IDE controllers to no avail.

We are using the same brand of mainboard we've used previously (ECS), and the only difference between this one and the previous one's are the addition of a SATA Raid controller on-board.

Hope this is a clear enough explanation. Anyone else experienced anything like this with e-smith?

 

[ldkeen]

Glen,
Are the drives SATA drives or IDE? If they are SATA then you are probably running with the old driver. To get the maximum performance from the SATA drives you need to be using both libata and ata_piix modules. A quick way to find this out is if the drives show up as hda and hdc for example then you are using the old drivers. The SATA drives should appear as sda and sdc if the correct drivers are being used. You can check the speed of the drives using hdparm /dev/xxx (where x is one of your drives and if it's software raid it's probably something like md1):
#hdparm -Tt /dev/xxx
You should be pulling over 20MB/s on a timed buffer disk read if it's using the correct driver.
Also do an lsmod to see if you can see libata and ata_piix modules listed.
Lloyd

[glenn-cns]

Thanks for the reply.

We're using IDE disks and not SATA (We tried SATA once and the SME install can't detect any disks so won't proceed; IDE's fine with us though)

I'll try your suggestions and see what figures I get back...

[glenn-cns]

Hmmm. I tried the hdparm -Tt /dev/md1 and got: 2.96 MB/sec on the timed buffer disk read!

On another, similar server with software RAID on IDE disks I get the following:
/dev/md1:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.73 seconds =175.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.35 seconds = 47.41 MB/sec

Are there certain types of motherboard that doesn't work with e-smith?

[the_mad_prof]

I don't know if this relevant but sounds like a similar problem I had with an older PC - a Compaq deskpro.  It was running fine with a 10GB ata66 drive.  I then donated this to my father in law (hand me up) and opted for a 40GB ata133.  Although the PC identifie this correctly SME was slow, slower in fact that a 4.3 ata33 drive I had kicking about - weird.
BTW I had also tied hpdarm on the 40GB.

Came to the (non-scientific) conclusion that there was some kind of hardware conflict, but strangely using Michiel Blotwijk's contrib to mount a second hard drive and using the 4.3 as boot it works fine again.

[guiguid]

It's normal, your motherboard it too recent !
DMA aren't activated ---> poor speed

It's time to read and do "THE KERNEL UPDATE HOWTO" !

Bye

[glenn-cns]

Thanks to all who replied...

First I tried Ian's howto (http://www.wellsi.com/sme/kernel/kernel.html), but it didn't work - failed dependencies on VPN related files (freespan, pptp and one other)

Then I tried SleepySME's kernel upgrade how-to (at http://www.vanhees.cc/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=18) and it worked!

Disk access went from 2.9MB/sec to 58MB/sec - that's more like it! Thanks again. I learnt a little more about all this!