[CentOS] 3Ware 9550SX and latency/system responsiveness

[Simon Banton]

At 07:46 +0800 24/9/07, Feizhou wrote:
>>... plus an Out of Memory kill of sshd. Second time around (logged 
>>in on the console rather than over ssh), it's just the same except 
>>it's hald that happens to get clobbered instead.
>
>Are you saying that running in RAID0 mode with this card and 
>motherboard combination, you get a memory leak? Who is the culprit?

I don't know if it's caused by a memory leak or something else, I'm 
just describing what happens. I would be tempted to suspect the RAM 
itself if another identical machine didn't have exactly the same 
issue.

>>what's left to try?
>
>Bug report...

I've reported the issue to 3ware but they've not responded. I 
replicated the problem with RHEL AS 4 update 5 and contacted RedHat 
but they told me evaluation subscriptions aren't supported.

>>I see there's a new firmware version out today (3ware codeset 
>>9.4.1.3... I guess I'll update it and push the whole thing back up 
>>the hill for another go.
>
>I hope that fixes things for you.

Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong - maybe this responsiveness 
issue won't even arise during normal operation, perhaps it's just a 
symptom of intensive benchmarking when all the resources of the 
machine are devoted to throwing data at the card/disks as fast as 
possible. I'm now way out of my depth, frankly.

I'm going to try the latest firmware upgrade, followed by RHEL/CentOS 
5, and finally see if I can replicate with a different card (Areca or 
LSI, perhaps).

Thanks for all the feedback, at least I feel as if I've tried every 
conceivable obvious thing.

S.