Bad disk performance on HP DL360 with Smart Array P400i RAID controller

I have a HP DL360 server with 4x 146GB SAS disks and a Smart Array P400i RAID controller with 256MB cache. The disks are in RAID 5 (3 disks + 1 hot spare).

The server is running VMware ESX 3i.

The disk write performance is really bad. Here are some numbers:

ns1:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3364 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1685.69 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 18 MB in 3.79 seconds = 4.75 MB/sec

ns1:~# time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=125000 && sync"
125000+0 records in
125000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 282.307 s, 3.6 MB/s

real 4m52.003s
user 0m2.160s
sys 3m10.796s

Compared to another server those number are terrible: Dell R200, 2x 500GB SATA disks, PERC raid controller (disks are mirrored).

web4:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 6584 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3297.79 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 316 MB in 3.02 seconds = 104.79 MB/sec

web4:~# time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=125000 && sync"
125000+0 records in
125000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 35.2919 s, 29.0 MB/s

real 0m36.570s
user 0m0.476s
sys 0m32.298s

The server isn't very loaded and the VMware Infrastructure Client performance monitor is showing 550KBps average read and 1208KBps average write for the last 30 minutes (highest write rate: 6.6MBps).

This has been a problem from the start. Any ideas?

Comments

linux - Awstats - outputting stats for merged Access_logs only producing stats for one server's log

I've been attempting this for two weeks and I've accessed countless number of sites on this issue and it seems there is something I'm not getting here and I'm at a lost. I manged to figure out how to merge logs from two servers together. (Taking care to only merge the matching domains together) The logs from the first server span from 15 Dec 2012 to 8 April 2014 The logs from the second server span from 2 Mar 2014 to 9 April 2014 I was able to successfully merge them using the logresolvemerge.pl script simply enermerating each log and > out_putting_it_to_file Looking at the two logs from each server the format seems exactly the same. The problem I'm having is producing the stats page for the logs. The command I've boiled it down to is /usr/share/awstats/tools/awstats_buildstaticpages.pl -configdir=/home/User/Documents/conf/ -config=example.com awstatsprog=/usr/share/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl dir=/home/User/Documents/parced -month=all -year=all...

iLO 3 Firmware Update (HP Proliant DL380 G7)

The iLO web interface allows me to upload a .bin file ( Obtain the firmware image (.bin) file from the Online ROM Flash Component for HP Integrated Lights-Out. ) The iLO web interface redirects me to a page in the HP support website ( http://www.hp.com/go/iLO ) where I am supposed to find this .bin firmware, but no luck for me. The support website is a mess and very slow, badly categorized and generally unusable. Where can I find this .bin file? The only related link I am able to find asks me about my server operating system (what does this have to do with the iLO?!) and lets me download an .iso with no .bin file And also a related question: what is the latest iLO 3 version? (for Proliant DL380 G7, not sure if the iLO is tied to the server model)

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits, ...

Blog

Search This Blog