7.0-Release and 3ware 9550SXU w/BBU - horrible write performance

[Mike Tancsa]

At 12:50 PM 3/4/2008, alan bryan wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've got a new server with a 3ware 9550SXU with the
>Battery.  I am using FreeBSD 7.0-Release (tried both
>4BSD and ULE) using AMD64 and the 3ware performance
>for writes is just plain horrible.  Something is
>obviously wrong but I'm not sure what.

Not sure about 7.0, but I have this card on a 6.3 box.  Doing 
something simple like

% cat /dev/zero > big

% iostat -c 100
       tty             da0            pass0             cpu
  tin tout  KB/t tps  MB/s   KB/t tps  MB/s  us ni sy in id
    0    0 53.92   6  0.31   0.00   0  0.00   3  0  0  0 96
    3  197  4.00   1  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   0  0  0  0 100
    1   64 127.94 1100 137.42   0.00   0  0.00   0  0 49  5 46
    0   63 128.00 1012 126.50   0.00   0  0.00   2  0 34  5 59
    0   63 128.00 969 121.13   0.00   0  0.00   1  0 30  2 66
    0   62 127.85 758 94.67   0.00   0  0.00   1  0 26  4 69
    0   61 127.82 1252 156.25   0.00   0  0.00   1  0 50  8 42
    0   63 127.59 542 67.59   0.00   0  0.00   1  0 26  1 72
    0   61 127.66 1026 127.90   0.00   0  0.00   0  0 47  5 49
    1   87 127.56 513 63.97   0.00   0  0.00   0  0 19  4 77
    0   61  0.00   0  0.00   0.00   0  0.00   0  0  0  0 100


Shows pretty OK write performance.

% dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/big bs=1024k count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes transferred in 8.646134 secs (121276863 bytes/sec)


This is on RAID10 on 4 Segate ST380811AS drives.

3ware device driver for 9000 series storage controllers, version: 3.60.04.003
twa0: <3ware 9000 series Storage Controller> port 0xac00-0xac3f mem 
0xf4000000-0xf5ffffff,0xff2ff000-0xff2fffff irq 16 at device 3.0 on pci2
twa0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
twa0: INFO: (0x15: 0x1300): Controller details:: Model 9550SX-4LP, 4 
ports, Firmware FE9X 3.01.01.028, BIOS BE9X 3.01.00.024
da0: <AMCC 9550SX-4LP DISK 3.01> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: 100.000MB/s transfers
da0: 152566MB (312455168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 19449C)

I have write cache enabled and performance set for the StorSav. Its 
in a PCI-x slot as well.

         ---Mike