On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 09:30:50AM +0100, Timo Schoeler wrote:

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Hi list,

please forgive cross posting, but I cannot specify the problem enough to say whether list it fits perfectly, so I'll ask on both.

I have some machines based with following specs (see at the end of the email).

They run CentOS 5.4 x86_64 with the latest patches applied, Xen-enabled and should host one or more domUs. I put the domUs' storage on LVM, as I learnt ages ago (what never caused any problems) and is way faster than using file-based 'images'.

However, there's something special about these machines: They have the new WD EARS series drives, which use 4K sector sizes. So, I booted a rescue system and used fdisk to start at sector 64 instead of 63 (long story made short: Due to overhead causing the drive to do much more, inefficient writes when starting at sector 63, the performance collapses; with 'normal' geometry (sector 63), the drive achieves about 25MiByte/sec writes, with starting at sector 64 partition, it achieves almost 100MiByte/sec writes):

[root@server2 ~]# fdisk -ul /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 64 2097223 1048580 fd Linux raid autodetect Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 2097224 18876487 8389632 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 18876488 1953525167 967324340 fd Linux raid autodetect

On top of those (two per machine) WD EARS HDs there's ``md'' providing two RAID1, /boot and LVM, as well as swap per HD (i.e. non-RAIDed). LVM provides the / partition as well as LVs for Xen domUs.

I have about 60 machines running that style and never had any problems. They run like a charm. On these machines, however, domUs are *very* slow, have a steady (!) load of about two -- 50% stating in 'wait' -- and all operations take ages, e.g. a ``yum update'' with the recently released updates.

Now, can that be due to 4K issues I didn't see, nestet now in LVM?

Help is very appreciated.

Maybe the default LVM alignment is wrong for these drives.. did you check/verify that?

See: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase...

Especially the "--metadatasize" option.

-- Pasi