linux-ext4 - Re: mdadm software raid + ext4, capped at ~350MiB/s limitation/bug?

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Date:	Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:09:46 -0500
From:	Bill Davidsen <davidsen@....com>
To:	Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@...idpixels.com>
CC:	Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-raid@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	Alan Piszcz <ap@...arrain.com>
Subject: Re: mdadm software raid + ext4, capped at ~350MiB/s limitation/bug?

Justin Piszcz wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 28 Feb 2010, Neil Brown wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 08:47:48 -0500 (EST)
>> Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@...idpixels.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I have two separate systems and with ext4 I cannot get speeds 
>>> greater than
>>> ~350MiB/s when using ext4 as the filesystem on top of a raid5 or raid0.
>>> It appears to be a bug with ext4 (or its just that ext4 is slower 
>>> for this
>>> test)?
>>>
>>> Each system runs 2.6.33 x86_64.
>>
>> Could be related to the recent implementation of IO barriers in md.
>> Can you try mounting your filesystem with
>>   -o barrier=0
>>
>> and see how that changes the result.
>>
>> NeilBrown
>
> Hi Neil,
>
> Thanks for the suggestion, it has been used here:
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/2/27/66
>
> Looks like an EXT4 issue as XFS does ~600MiB/s..?
>
> Its strange though, on a single hard disk, I get approximately the 
> same speed for XFS and EXT4, but when it comes to scaling across 
> multiple disks,
> in RAID-0 or RAID-5 (tested), there is a performance problem as it hits a
> performance problem at ~350MiB/s.  I tried multiple chunk sizes but 
> nothing
> seemed to made a difference (whether 64KiB or 1024KiB), XFS performs at
> 500-600MiB/s no matter what and EXT4 does not exceed ~350MiB/s.
>
> Is there anyone on any of the lists that gets > 350MiB/s on a mdadm/sw 
> raid
> with EXT4?
>
> A single raw disk, no partitions:
> p63:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdm bs=1M count=10240
> 10240+0 records in
> 10240+0 records out
> 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 92.4249 s, 116 MB/s

I hate to say it, but I don't think this measures anything useful. When 
I was doing similar things I got great variabilty in my results until I 
learned about the fdatasync option so you measure the actual speed to 
the destination and not the disk cache. After that my results were far 
slower and reproducible.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@....com>
  "We can't solve today's problems by using the same thinking we
   used in creating them." - Einstein

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