iSCSI performance

[Adrian Gschwend]

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I finally invested some time to get iSCSI to work on FreeBSD. Now I do
have an iSCSI disk mounted in the system so I started doing some
performance tests against an NetApp FAS3020 head with an iSCSI LUN
configured for my FreeBSD 7.0-stable box.

It's a rather old IBM server and I used sysbench to get some stats.

The results I got were:

local SCSI disk, UFS:
- --
Operations performed:  5999 Read, 4001 Write, 12800 Other = 22800 Total
Read 93.734Mb  Written 62.516Mb  Total transferred 156.25Mb  (2.2672Mb/sec)
  145.10 Requests/sec executed
- --


NFS share on the NetApp (no tweaking, default NFS mount):
- --
Operations performed:  6006 Read, 3994 Write, 12800 Other = 22800 Total
Read 93.844Mb  Written 62.406Mb  Total transferred 156.25Mb  (11.948Mb/sec)
  764.69 Requests/sec executed
- --


iSCSI with UFS:
- --
Operations performed:  6004 Read, 3996 Write, 12800 Other = 22800 Total
Read 93.812Mb  Written 62.438Mb  Total transferred 156.25Mb  (489.41Kb/sec)
   30.59 Requests/sec executed
- --

which is a rather bad results for iSCSI ;)

Note that I didn't want to get the real performance so I just took the
default sysbench lines I found in the docs. It was just to get something
to compare to.

Googling a bit I found this posting here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2008-February/003383.html

Is this patch in -CURRENT by now or do I still have to compile the stuff
on my own if I want to do some more tests?

And is anyone actively working on iSCSI right now? I do have some
proposals regarding iscontrol as well, the tool is not yet idiot proof
;) What would be the appropriate list to post feedback regarding that?

next thing on my list is to try ZFS on the iSCSI share but I would like
to see some better performance on UFS first :)

BTW in case you wonder why I want to use iSCSI: I am running a
subversion server with rather big repositories using "fsfs" on NFS and I
run into very weird PROPFIND problems (Apache frontent) when importing
large quantities of data and I don't have the problem doing the same on
a local drive of the server. So I guess that's some NFS locking stuff I
couldn't get rid of.
The idea is to replace that with iSCSI and ZFS (I love NetApps snapshot
feature and I want that too in the future, so ZFS) once both is declared
as stable (yes, I have time :)

cu

Adrian



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