> I have had extremely bad performance historically with onboard SATA chipsets
> on Linux. The one exception has been with the Intel based chipsets (not the
> CPU, the I/O chipset).
>
This board has Intel chipset. I cannot remember the exact type but it
was not in the low end category.
dmesg says:
<Intel ICH7 SATA300 controller>
kernel: ad4: 152626MB <SAMSUNG HD160JJ ZM100-33> at ata2-master SATA150
kernel: ad4: 152627MB <SAMSUNG HD160JJ ZM100-33> at ata3-master SATA150
> It is very likely that you are having problems with the driver for the
> chipset.
>
> Are you running RAID1 in hardware? If so, turn it off and see what the
> performance is. The onboard hardware RAID is worse than useless, it
> actually slows the I/O down.
>
I'm using software raid, namely gmirror:
GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0 created (id=2574033628).
GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: provider ad4 detected.
GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: provider ad6 detected.
GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: provider ad4 activated.
GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: provider ad6 activated.
#gmirror list
Geom name: gm0
State: COMPLETE
Components: 2
Balance: round-robin
Slice: 4096
Flags: NONE
GenID: 0
SyncID: 1
ID: 2574033628
Providers:
1. Name: mirror/gm0
Mediasize: 160040803328 (149G)
Sectorsize: 512
Mode: r5w5e6
Consumers:
1. Name: ad4
Mediasize: 160040803840 (149G)
Sectorsize: 512
Mode: r1w1e1
State: ACTIVE
Priority: 0
Flags: DIRTY
GenID: 0
SyncID: 1
ID: 1153981856
2. Name: ad6
Mediasize: 160041885696 (149G)
Sectorsize: 512
Mode: r1w1e1
State: ACTIVE
Priority: 0
Flags: DIRTY
GenID: 0
SyncID: 1
ID: 3520427571
I tried to do:
#sysctl vfs.read_max=32
vfs.read_max: 6 -> 32
but I could not reach better disk read performance.
Thank you for your suggestions. Looks like I need to buy SCSI disks.
Regards,
Laszlo