Hello,
I have strange behaviour on a server that I can't get a handle on. I have a reasonably powerful server running VMware server 1.0.4-56528. It has a RAID5 build with mdadm on 5 SATA drives. Masses of ram and 2 XEON CPUs. But it stutters.
Example : fire up vi, press and keep finger on i. After filling 2-3 lines, the display is stopped for 2-12 seconds. Then they continue. This happens even on the host OS, at the console.
Host system running CentOS 5.2 x86-64:
CPU : 2x Xeon E5430 @ 2.66GHz RAM : 24GB Mobo : DSBV-DX HD : 5 x SATA ST3750330AS 750GB in RAID5
There are 5 VMs, detailed at http://www.awale.qc.ca/vmware/stj1.txt to make this mail shorter.
Seems to me this system should be more then adequate to handle the load.
This is what vmstat on the host looks like when the server is "unhappy" : http://www.awale.qc.ca/vmware/vmstat.txt Spending a lot of time in 'wa', but 'bo' and 'bi' are miniscule.
The problem seems like a disk problem. I grow to suspect that SATA isn't ready for the big time. I also grow to dislike RAID5.
Questions :
- Anyone have a clue or other on how to track down my bottle neck?
- SATA NCQ is limited to 15 queue depth. Is this per-SATA-port or per-SATA-chip? Or does this question make no sense?
- I realise there are more recent versions of CentOS out. Are there specific items in the changelogs that would affect my problem?
Thank you for any help,
-Philip