Topic: Major performance issues migrating from SBS 2003 to SME 7

[weblance]

I have now tried to IMAP an account with Tunderbird. The account has 2252 mails in inbox and it took about 10-15 seconds to synchronize. So my conclusion is that Outlook isn't very at IMAP.

[Stefano]

I have now tried to IMAP an account with Tunderbird. The account has 2252 mails in inbox and it took about 10-15 seconds to synchronize. So my conclusion is that Outlook isn't very at IMAP.

doh

[weblance]

Now the more serious thing is the slow performance on the filesystem. I hope this has something todo with SW RAID 1 or wrong AHCI BIOS settings, i´d hate to revert back to SBS.

[Jáder]

I bet all on AHCI... have seen this problem more than once.

Just remember to have a good backup and be ready to use SME Rescue mode if you get a kernel panic because of missing driver. You'll change a very important thing on your server.

I imagine you saw the performance issue when formating... but thought would be fine.
How long you wait to format your HDDs? Several (+4) hours ?

Regards

Jáder

[weblance]

I bet all on AHCI... have seen this problem more than once.

Just remember to have a good backup and be ready to use SME Rescue mode if you get a kernel panic because of missing driver. You'll change a very important thing on your server.

I imagine you saw the performance issue when formating... but thought would be fine.
How long you wait to format your HDDs? Several (+4) hours ?

Regards

Jáder

I don't really remember how long it took to format, but I imagine it took about 2 hrs. I have 4x300GB SCSI Ultra 320, running HW RAID 1 (2x300GB) and SME running the SW RAID 0.

What should the AHCI settings be?

[MSmith]

Unless you've got a *really good* hardware RAID controller, it would be better simply to have SME arrange everything into RAID5.  Your file performance issue is probably in that combination of "hardware" & Linux RAID.

[Stefano]

I don't really remember how long it took to format, but I imagine it took about 2 hrs. I have 4x300GB SCSI Ultra 320, running HW RAID 1 (2x300GB) and SME running the SW RAID 0.

SME doesn't support Raid 0, so can you please clarify?

thank you

[weblance]

SME doesn't support Raid 0, so can you please clarify?

thank you

Sorry it's the other way around. I'm letting the servers hardware controller stripe (RAID 0) my discs. And SME is mirroring (RAID1).

Im thinking of dropping RAID1 and just stripe all my discs into one volume. I'm already doing daily backup, so the extra security in RAID1 isn't so important.

[weblance]

Unless you've got a *really good* hardware RAID controller, it would be better simply to have SME arrange everything into RAID5.  Your file performance issue is probably in that combination of "hardware" & Linux RAID.

RAID5 isn't an option that I would like to use!

http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

[weblance]

I can see now that the performance issue can be in the RAID setup. I'm running RAID 0+1, hardware RAID0 and software RAID1, This probably wasn't the wisest choise. It would be better if I ran hardware RAID 1+0, and no RAID from SME.

What do you guys think? What about software RAID10 - can SME handle it?

[brianr]

what do you get when you try

hdparm -t /dev/hda

(or whatever your drives are named?)

I also think that the Outlook problem will be better once you move to a 1gb switch. I have used Outlook 2010 with 1,000s of emails, and it does work (albeit not as well as Thunderbird)

[weblance]

what do you get when you try

hdparm -t /dev/hda

(or whatever your drives are named?)

I also think that the Outlook problem will be better once you move to a 1gb switch. I have used Outlook 2010 with 1,000s of emails, and it does work (albeit not as well as Thunderbird)

I have these results from hdparm.

/dev/sda1:  24 MB in 3.12 seconds = 7.70 MB/sec
/dev/sda2:  20 MB in 3.23 seconds = 6.81 MB/sec
/dev/sdb1:  20 MB in 3.10 seconds = 6.44 MB/sec
/dev/sdb2:  20 MB in 3.08 seconds = 6.50 MB/sec

Are they any good?

[byte]

I have these results from hdparm.

/dev/sda1:  24 MB in 3.12 seconds = 7.70 MB/sec
/dev/sda2:  20 MB in 3.23 seconds = 6.81 MB/sec
/dev/sdb1:  20 MB in 3.10 seconds = 6.44 MB/sec
/dev/sdb2:  20 MB in 3.08 seconds = 6.50 MB/sec

Are they any good?

Nope my ide drives get better than that, I think you've seriously got to review your setup here and make sure you've taken all advice in this thread.

[weblance]

Nope my ide drives get better than that, I think you've seriously got to review your setup here and make sure you've taken all advice in this thread.

Yes, i would be in serious trouble without you guys. It's probably my RAID setup. I'm gonna try to get RAID 1+0, RAID10 or if they aren't available, then i'll try RAID5.

[christian]

Are they any good?

As a data point for you, when I run this on my system with disks sda through to sdm configured as my main RAID1, my extra RAID1 set, my RAID5 set, and my large LVM, I get in the order of 90MB/s to 100MB/s on each within 3 seconds. These disks are retail grade 1TB and 2TB drives.

With that speed, I'm sure I'm testing writes to my cache but even with rsync of large files I routinely see writes in the order of about 60MB/s