System goes very slow (was: Re: [linux-lvm] Test of LVM)
Peter Kirk
pwk.linuxfan at gmx.de
Sun May 27 02:56:24 UTC 2001
This is what bonnie gives me
Am Samstag, 26. Mai 2001 17:49 schrieben Sie:
> On Saturday, 26 May 2001, at 14:35:45 +0200,
>
> Peter Kirk wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have two disks in one Logical Volume, and all "Partitions" in the LV
> > are striped over the disks, the two disks are both:
>
> I suppose you mean "a VG consiting of the two disks, with LV created with
> --stripe=2, that is like a RAID-0 would do" :)
I have no idea of what I mean, in the setup with SuSE`s installer (yast)
there was this place to set the stripe option, which I set to two.
>
> > Now I would like to know, how to test if my LVM is performing as it
> > should, [...]
>
> Depending on what you want to test, you can use several methods/tools
> ranging from dd'ing data in and out, recursive copying, hdparm, bonnie,
> bonnie++ and mongo. Check http://bulma.lug.net/static to see some
> filesystem-oriented test you could try.
I tried bonnie, is this result what I should have expected ?
root at notch:/home/pwk > bonnie -s 1024MB
Bonnie 1.2: File './Bonnie.2815', size: 1073741824, volumes: 1
Writing with putc()... done: 3270 kB/s 35.4 %CPU
Rewriting... done: 1505 kB/s 19.3 %CPU
Writing intelligently... done: 4682 kB/s 11.4 %CPU
[I stopped bonnie here, do you need more output ?]
I don't know what this test does, but surely more than 3MB/sec of writing
performance should be ??
I'm not certain if this problem I am about to describe is LVM specific, but I
think that the most propable cause:
When I do e.g. a run of bonnie (-> My disks have work to do), the entire
System goes *extremly* slow (each key hit takes about 1sec to apear on the
terminal, from the command top to the coming up of the ascii chart there is a
time gap of ~20sec...)
As Andreas Dilger pointed out, I can't have to disks on one Controler doing
things simultanously. Might this somehow be the reason why my systems snails
on disk usage ?
There is something I tested in such times of slowness, and that is the output
of top
top [normal running system + X + KDE]
319 root 17 0 196M 196M 2352 S 0.7 39.2 6:33 X
2586 pwk 12 0 12856 12M 11092 S 0.1 2.5 0:43 kdeinit
2887 root 16 0 980 980 764 R 0.1 0.1 0:00 top
1 root 9 0 216 216 180 S 0.0 0.0 0:07 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:35 kswapd
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kreclaimd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:14 bdflush
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:07 kupdated
top [system with bonnie running]
2815 root 17 0 544 544 440 R 37.5 0.1 4:50 bonnie
319 root 16 0 196M 196M 2352 R 15.4 39.2 6:01 X
2599 pwk 15 0 19344 18M 12580 S 12.5 3.7 1:58 kmail
2189 pwk 10 0 11540 11M 7048 S 9.9 2.2 3:21 kmix
865 pwk 9 0 3168 3168 2272 S 1.7 0.6 0:53 artsd
896 pwk 9 0 11436 11M 10220 S 1.1 2.2 1:29 kdeinit
893 pwk 9 0 14448 14M 12344 S 0.9 2.8 1:03 kdeinit
2885 pwk 12 0 980 980 764 R 0.7 0.1 0:00 top
891 pwk 10 0 14916 14M 12904 S 0.1 2.9 0:40 kdeinit
2586 pwk 9 0 12840 12M 11076 S 0.1 2.5 0:42 kdeinit
1 root 9 0 216 216 180 S 0.0 0.0 0:07 init
As you see, all processes seam to take much more CPU time when bonnie is
running [noting that I am not using any of the programms activly, there are
only running].
I would realy love to get rid of this problem, so please help. If you think I
should try one of my HD on the second controler, could you please give me
some hints of how not to destroy my linux system by doing this (where do I
have to change things)
>
> My (little) experience with stripped LVs is that throughput is quite lower
> that the achieved with kernel's software RAID-0: the latter achieved
> nearly the sum of the disks's R/W KB/s, while stripped LVs performance
> felt quite behind.
>
> But this was a _very_ simple test with a Pentium75 machine, with 16 MB RAM
> and two disks, 400 MB one and 800 MB the other (tested with bonnie). So
> results can be far from true under more realistic setups :).
>
Can anybody comment on the speed difference between softraid0 and LVM ?
Thank you in advance
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