[DRBD-user] Large discrepancies between non-DRBD and disconnected-DRBD on

Oliver Hookins oliver.hookins at anchor.com.au
Tue May 27 06:02:11 CEST 2008

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0.7.22
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Hi,

I've recently upgraded a couple of machines we already had running DRBD
0.7.22 and previously the performance we were seeing seemed ok so I didn't
do comprehensive tests. Now that the machines have been upgraded and are
doing a bit more we are starting to notice the performance isn't quite what
it should be.

Briefly the systems are:
Supermicro X7DBP
2 x Intel Xeon 5160 dual core @ 3GHz
4GB ECC DDR400
Adaptec 2020ZCR RAID card
2 x 147GB 15krpm SCSI drives
2 x 300GB 10krpm SCSI drives
RHEL4ES 64bit on 2.6.9-67.0.7.ELsmp kernel
DRBD 0.7.22 (which is the latest stable version that was available at the
time the cluster was built)

Each of the drives is only set up as a logical drive in the RAID card, and
RAID1 is done in the software for each pair of drives. We have write-caching
turned on for the 147GB drives.

If I test write speed with something like
'time sync; time dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1G count=4; time sync'
on a non-DRBD partition of the 147GB RAID, I see write speeds of about 53MB/s.

If I perform the same test on a DRBD partition on the 147GB RAID that is
disconnected, I'm seeing write speeds of about 38MB/s. To go down to about
70% of non-DRBD performance before we have even taken into account slowdowns
due to the network is a very big performance hit.

I'm also seeing similar results on the 300GB drives, but about 33% less
performance overall again due to the drop in spindle speed. DRBD-connected
speed is even worse but I'm holding off on persuing that until I have the
disconnected speeds sorted out.

Some other info:
al-extents 601
meta-disk is internal
(I know this represents a metadata write after only 2.3GB or so, but we see
the same slow performance with smaller write sizes)

comms over 1GbE NICs directly connected
MTU of 9000
syncer rate 50M
sndbuf-size 256K
max-buffers 2048
max-epoch-size 2048

As I said, the network side probably needs attention as well but for the
moment I need to address the large discrepancy between the non-DRBD and
disconnected-DRBD speeds first. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

-- 
Regards,
Oliver Hookins



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