Tweaking Perc 6i for throughput

[Scott R. Ehrlich]

Guess I mis-read your email.  I thought I'd read withOUT APF, the 
connection was faster.  Should get my eyes checked ;-)

Scott

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Drew Weaver wrote:

> Hi Scott,
>
> APF is a firewall and in my tests I found that it makes the connections slower.
>
> Thanks,
> -Drew
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Scott R. Ehrlich
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:31 AM
> To: linux-poweredge at dell.com
> Subject: RE: Tweaking Perc 6i for throughput
>
> Hello to all:
>
> In light of the email below, I have some PE2950 servers with an MD3000i,
> and ordered the servers with no OS installed.  I've learned that APF comes
> pre-installed, but I performed my own OS install - CentOS 5.2 out-of-box,
> no patches or updates, how do I obtain and install APF to help with
> performance, or will APF do nothing for an iSCSI connection?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Scott
>
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Drew Weaver wrote:
>
>> Sorry (don't like to reply to my own spams) I forgot to mention that in IPERF:
>>
>> [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.10 GBytes    942 Mbits/sec
>>
>> So I know the network isn't the bottleneck.
>>
>> -Drew
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com [mailto:linux] On Behalf Of Drew Weaver
>> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:13 AM
>> To: 'linux-poweredge at dell.com'
>> Subject: Tweaking Perc 6i for throughput
>>
>> Sorry for the length.
>>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I am doing some anecdotal 'speed testing' using two 2950s with PERC 6i that are both connected at 1Gbps (4Gbps port channel) to a Cisco 2960G.
>>
>> On the downloading side I have both a RAID-1 and a RAID-6 volume, on the uploading side I have only a RAID-1 volume.
>>
>> Some things I've noted:
>>
>> If APF is enabled on the downloading (wget) side and I download to the RAID-1 volume:
>>
>> 	The transfer starts out at 50M/s and then pauses and drops down to 20M/s and then goes back up to 50 and then to 30 (the idea is it is all over the map).
>>
>> 100%[=====================================>] 3,662,573,568 19.5M/s   in 1m 41s
>>
>> If APF is enabled on the download side and I download to the RAID-6 volume:
>>
>> 100%[=====================================>] 3,662,573,568 49.0M/s   in 73s
>>
>> As you can see the RAID-6 volume crushes the RAID-1 Volume.
>>
>> If I disable APF (raid-1):
>>
>> The transfer starts out at 110MB/sec (WOW) but quickly drops, it ends up at:
>>
>> 07:51:08 (44.4 MB/s) - `Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso.3' saved [3662573568/3662573568]
>>
>> APF disabled (raid-6)
>>
>> 07:52:24 (79.2 MB/s) - `Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso.11' saved [3662573568/3662573568]
>>
>> So conclusions so far:
>>
>> --APF kills throughput
>> --RAID-1 is slower than RAID-6 (duh)
>> --For some reason this card even in RAID-6 generates a lot of IOWAIT and pauses in the transfer.
>> --During the transfer the sending server has IOWAIT all over the place (RAID-1)
>>
>> Does anyone have any tips I can use to improve performance of both APF and the controller(s) both raid-1 and raid-6 themselves?
>>
>> I am considering changing the sending server to either raid-10 or raid-6, please advise as to what would deliver the best performance.
>>
>> I'd like to get as close to 'to the wall' as possible.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Drew
>>
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>
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