Hi, I hope this is in the right place.
I've spent the best part of this week getting my home server rebuilt and set up, and am currently moving the data back across from backups, but it seems to me to be going more than a little slowly and I'm hoping you guys can help. It used to be a linux box, but the motherboard was giving out, so almost everything except the drives and case got replaced.
My setup:
MB: D410-PT w/ Intel Atom mini-itx, 64 bit single core @ 1.66GHz
1Gb ram
4x 500Gb SATA drives (2 on the onboard controller, 2 via a Si3114 pci card)
Partitioned: 1gb ufs /boot; 1Gb swap each; with the rest of the space used for raid-z1 across them all
FreeBSD 8.0-Release amd64
vm.kmem_size_max="512M"
vm.kmem_size="512M"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="100M"
The install process was... arduous to say the least. First of all it seems like my motherboard, despite being a recent model, doesn't like GUID Partition Tables. It also didn't want to boot entirely via the pci sata card, so it took me a day or two of frustration to actually get the system installed.
I would like to set up the ufs /boot partition to be mirrored with one or all of the other drives, but that is a lower priority than getting the system back up and shiney.
What I am concerned about mostly is the write performance of the array. I've done some tests with dd, as well as monitoring with zpool iostat, and my average write speeds seem to be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 MB/sec.
Amusingly (or not), when testing with dd, I got an average of 3.17 MB/sec, but with "zpool iostat zroot 1" running, dd reported just 2.78 MB/sec.
Finding stats from similar specced systems online is proving tricky, but I think I'm right in thinking this is surprisingly low write speeds, aren't I?
I'm not sure where exactly the bottleneck is. As I write this, I'm copying from a usb-attached disk at similar rates: the cpu is at 10-15%, only about 250MB of physical ram is in use, and there's just 5MB in swap. I'm wondering if the problem could be the Si3114 pci-sata card (and then is the problem the card or the pci bus?).
Any suggestions would be welcomed.
I've spent the best part of this week getting my home server rebuilt and set up, and am currently moving the data back across from backups, but it seems to me to be going more than a little slowly and I'm hoping you guys can help. It used to be a linux box, but the motherboard was giving out, so almost everything except the drives and case got replaced.
My setup:
MB: D410-PT w/ Intel Atom mini-itx, 64 bit single core @ 1.66GHz
1Gb ram
4x 500Gb SATA drives (2 on the onboard controller, 2 via a Si3114 pci card)
Partitioned: 1gb ufs /boot; 1Gb swap each; with the rest of the space used for raid-z1 across them all
FreeBSD 8.0-Release amd64
vm.kmem_size_max="512M"
vm.kmem_size="512M"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="100M"
The install process was... arduous to say the least. First of all it seems like my motherboard, despite being a recent model, doesn't like GUID Partition Tables. It also didn't want to boot entirely via the pci sata card, so it took me a day or two of frustration to actually get the system installed.
I would like to set up the ufs /boot partition to be mirrored with one or all of the other drives, but that is a lower priority than getting the system back up and shiney.
What I am concerned about mostly is the write performance of the array. I've done some tests with dd, as well as monitoring with zpool iostat, and my average write speeds seem to be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 MB/sec.
Amusingly (or not), when testing with dd, I got an average of 3.17 MB/sec, but with "zpool iostat zroot 1" running, dd reported just 2.78 MB/sec.
Finding stats from similar specced systems online is proving tricky, but I think I'm right in thinking this is surprisingly low write speeds, aren't I?
I'm not sure where exactly the bottleneck is. As I write this, I'm copying from a usb-attached disk at similar rates: the cpu is at 10-15%, only about 250MB of physical ram is in use, and there's just 5MB in swap. I'm wondering if the problem could be the Si3114 pci-sata card (and then is the problem the card or the pci bus?).
Any suggestions would be welcomed.