From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266851AbUG1Jrb (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:47:31 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266854AbUG1Jrb (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:47:31 -0400 Received: from mailr.eris.qinetiq.com ([128.98.1.9]:34520 "HELO qinetiq-tim.net") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S266851AbUG1Jr2 convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:47:28 -0400 From: Mark Watts Organization: QinetiQ To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: mke2fs -j goes nuts on 3Ware 8506-4LP Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 10:50:19 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.6.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Message-Id: <200407281050.24958.m.watts@eris.qinetiq.com> X-AntiVirus: checked by Vexira MailArmor (version: 2.0.1.16; VAE: 6.26.0.10; VDF: 6.26.0.48; host: mailr.qinetiq-tim.net) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I have a 3Ware 8506-4LP controller with 4 250GB Maxtor SATA drives, in a raid-5 configuration (64K blocks) System is: Dual Opteron 246 (2GHz) 2GB RAM Tyan S2875 motherboard Kernel: 2.6.8-rc2 (pre-empt is ON) Rest of OS: Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 edition. When I execute a mke2fs -j /dev/sda7 to format a 600GB partition on the raid as ext3, the system slows to a crawl. Basically, the inode creation goes fine for the first 1000 nodes or so, then starts slowing to about 1 node per second. According to 'top' the systems 'buffers' value is almost all my ram and both cpus are at almost 100% in I/O wait. The system load will start to climb and it eventually hit ~15 before I got bored and rebotoed. X is totally unresponsive although 'top' does refresh occasionally in a konsole. I do understand that the 3Ware 8506 cards arent exactly stellar at raid-5 (we see ~22MB/sec write and upto 80MB/sec read if we're lucky) but surely a simple format of a filesystem shouldn't tie up the system like this? Would a different card (3Ware 9500 series or LSI Logic MegaRAID) help here? Cheers, Mark. P.S. As I write this, I'm doing an sa-learn (spamassassin) over 14k messages and the system is a little sluggish even though gkrellm is only showing ~1MB/sec on the 3Ware, so I'm guessing these are just pants cards in general. Periodically runnung 'sync' helps for a while but it fades again after that. - -- Mark Watts Senior Systems Engineer QinetiQ Trusted Information Management Trusted Solutions and Services group GPG Public Key ID: 455420ED -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBB3bgBn4EFUVUIO0RAsi1AKDdSQCoGU3XZgQfo7h6yVoYgJxfewCgjdW/ lQyWsb7xGk1ZCntcDAp8C20= =hJon -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----