raid stripe size vs performance

Thu Aug 20 20:49:55 UTC 2009

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 01:43:27PM -0700, Phill wrote:
> I'm rebuilding a RHEL 5 server used primarily for building code. 
> It has perc 6i controller and I'm installing 6 15K sas drives. 
> The plan is to setup a raid 10 configuration for improved performance. 
> Does anyone know if I can significantly increase or degrade my performance 
> by selecting a larger stripe size? The default is 64k and I have read in a 
> performance report that a 512k size may be more desirable for Linux systems. 
> Thanks for any replies.

Well.. if you do large sequential reads/writes then big stripe size will
help, but if you do small random-io then large stripe size like that will be
really bad.

It really depends on your workload.

-- Pasi