Simon Banton wrote: >>> At 17:34 +0800 14/9/07, Feizhou wrote: >>>> .oh....do you have a BBU for your write cache on your 3ware board? >>> >>> Not installed, but the machine's on a UPS. >> >> Ugh. The 3ware code will not give OK then until the stuff has hit disk. > > Having now installed BBUs, it's made no difference to the underlying > responsiveness problem I'm afraid. So a 3ware card will give OK once the stuff is in the cache and you have selected write-cache enable even if there is no BBU? My apologies. My previous experience has been with the 75xx and 85xx series which do not have ram caches. > > With ports 2 and 3 now configured as RAID 0, with ext3 filesystem and > mounted on /mnt/raidtest, running this bonnie++ command: > > bonnie++ -m RA-256_NR-8192 -n 0 -u 0 -r 4096 -s 20480 -f -b -d > /mnt/raidtest > > (RA- and NR- relate to kernel params for readahead and nr_requests > respectively - the values above are Centos post-installation defaults) > > ...causes load to climb: > > 16:36:12 up 13 min, 2 users, load average: 8.77, 4.78, 1.98 > > ... and uninterruptible processes: > > ps ax | grep D > PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND > 59 ? D 0:03 [kswapd0] > 2159 ? D 0:01 [kjournald] > 2923 ? Ds 0:00 syslogd -m 0 > 4155 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4175 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4192 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4193 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4197 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4199 ? D 0:00 [pdflush] > 4201 pts/1 R+ 0:00 grep D > > ... 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? > > Now that the presence or otherwise of a BBU has been ruled out along > with OS, 3ware recommended kernel param tweaks, RAID level, LVM, slot > speed, different but identical-spec hardware (both machine and card), > what's left to try? Bug report... > > I see there's a new firmware version out today (3ware codeset 9.4.1.3 - > driver's still at 2.26.05.007 but the fw's updated to from 3.08.02.005 > to 3.08.02.007), so 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.