Re: slow 'check'

[Eyal Lebedinsky <eyal@eyal.emu.id.au>]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
> 
>> I have a six-disk RAID5 over sata. First two disks are on the mobo and
>> last four
>> are on a Promise SATA-II-150-TX4. The sixth disk was added recently
>> and I decided
>> to run a 'check' periodically, and started one manually to see how
>> long it should
>> take. Vanilla 2.6.20.
>>
>> A 'dd' test shows:
>>
>> # dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10240
>> 10240+0 records in
>> 10240+0 records out
>> 10737418240 bytes transferred in 84.449870 seconds (127145468 bytes/sec)
>>
>> This is good for this setup. A check shows:
>>
>> $ cat /proc/mdstat
>> Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
>> md0 : active raid5 sda1[0] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
>>      1562842880 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
>>      [>....................]  check =  0.8% (2518144/312568576)
>> finish=2298.3min speed=2246K/sec
>>
>> unused devices: <none>
>>
>> which is an order of magnitude slower (the speed is per-disk, call it
>> 13MB/s
>> for the six). There is no activity on the RAID. Is this expected? I
>> assume
>> that the simple dd does the same amount of work (don't we check parity on
>> read?).
>>
>> I have these tweaked at bootup:
>>     echo 4096 >/sys/block/md0/md/stripe_cache_size
>>     blockdev --setra 32768 /dev/md0
>>
>> Changing the above parameters seems to not have a significant effect.
>>
>> The check logs the following:
>>
>> md: data-check of RAID array md0
>> md: minimum _guaranteed_  speed: 1000 KB/sec/disk.
>> md: using maximum available idle IO bandwidth (but not more than
>> 200000 KB/sec) for data-check.
>> md: using 128k window, over a total of 312568576 blocks.
>>
>> Does it need a larger window (whatever a window is)? If so, can it
>> be set dynamically?
>>
>> TIA
>>
>> -- 
>> Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal@eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
>>     attach .zip as .dat
> 
> As you add disks onto the PCI bus it will get slower.  For 6 disks you
> should get faster than 2MB/s however..
> 
> You can try increasing the min speed of the raid rebuild.

Interesting - this does help. I wonder why it used much more i/o by
default before. It still uses only ~16% CPU.

# echo 20000 >/sys/block/md0/md/sync_speed_min
# echo check >/sys/block/md0/md/sync_action
... wait about 10s for the process to settle...
# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid5 sda1[0] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
      1562842880 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]
      [>....................]  check =  0.1% (364928/312568576) finish=256.6min speed=20273K/sec
# echo idle >/sys/block/md0/md/sync_action

Raising it further only manages about 21MB/s (the _max is set to 200MB/s)
as expected; this is what the TX4 delivers with four disks. I need a better
controller (or is the linux driver slow?).

> Justin.

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal@eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>
	attach .zip as .dat