raid stripe size vs performance

[Sharpe, Sam J]

2009/8/20 Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>:
> 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.

I was about to say much the same thing in closing, but actually was
going to point you to this article which has different advice to
Pasi's (and different to how I would expect).

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perfStripe-c.html

It actually says that a large stripe size might be better for random
transactions on lots of small files (as I would expect from compiling
code), because it means you can read a whole small file from each disk
in the array - so in your case you'd be able to read 6 files at once
(1 from each stripe (3) multiplied by 2 (for the mirrored copies)). If
you had a small stripe size, you'd increase the chance that your small
file would be split across multiple disks - so you might require more
than one disk per file and you wouldn't get 6 concurrent accesses - in
your case it might involve up to three drives.

A small number of requests for large files might benefit from small
stripe sizes, because it would increase the chance that reading your
large file involved reads from multiple disks - so you'd get higher
throughput.

As always, "large" and "small" file sizes are subjective terms and
there is no substitute for benchmarking your own particular case - and
this is a hotly contested subject among Storage gurus!

-- 
Sam