Re: Slow Disk I/O with QPS M3 80GB HD

From: H . J . Lu (hjl@lucon.org)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 18:38:06 EST


On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 09:29:54AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 03:43:31PM -0800, H . J . Lu wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 11:57:08PM -0800, H . J . Lu wrote:
> > > On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 08:34:52PM -0800, H . J . Lu wrote:
> > > > I have a very strange problem. The disk I/O of my QPS M3 80GB HD is
> > > > very slow under 2.4.10 and above. I got like 1.77 MB/s from hdparm.
> > > > But under 2.4.9, I got 14 MB/s on the same hardware. A 30GB HD has
> > > > consistent I/O performance under 2.4.9 and above on the same bus. Has
> > > > anyone else seen this? Does anyone have a large (>= 80GB) 1394 HD?
> > > >
> > >
> > > I did a binary search. 2.4.10-pre10 is the last good kernel. I got
> > >
> > > # hdparm -t /dev/sda
> > >
> > > /dev/sda:
> > > Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.40 seconds = 14.55 MB/sec
> > >
> > > Even since 2.4.10-pre11 up to 2.4.16, I got about 1.77 MB/sec on the
> > > same hardware. However, I don't have problems with 80GB IDE HD. Has
> > > anyone seen I/O problems on large (>= 80GB) SCSI HD or HD with SCSI
> > > emulation?
> >
> > I tracked own the problem to 40_blkdev-pagecache-17 in the 2.4.10
> > pre10aa1 patch. When it is applied, the disk I/O on some drives become
> > very slow. It not only happens to my 80GB 1394 HD, but also the second
> > IDE drive. Before the patch
> >
> > # hdparm -t /dev/hdd
> >
> > /dev/hdd:
> > Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 8.02 seconds = 7.98 MB/sec
> >
> > After the patch
> >
> > # hdparm -t /dev/hdd
> >
> > /dev/hdd:
> > Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 21.09 seconds = 3.03 MB/sec
> >
> > The slow down is not as bad as 1394. But it is still very significant.
> > I couldn't figure out why it only affects certain drives.
>
> do you have a 4k filesystm mounted on /dev/hdd? if so then you will get
> the same performance with latest 2.4 (precisely after 2.4.1).
>

Even Sony F707 digital camera is slowed because your change from
2.4.10-pre10 to 2.4.10-pre11. It is a USB memory stick. It is 10 times
slower than before. So far, we have some USB and 1394 storage devices
are slowed down very badly. Some IDE hds also suffer. It is very
strange.

H.J.

----
3 files on USB:

# ls -l total 5984 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1991481 Dec 8 21:44 dsc00002.jpg -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2432127 Dec 8 23:54 dsc00005.jpg -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1675563 Dec 8 23:59 dsc00009.jpg

1. 2.4.10-pre10

# time /bin/cp * /tmp/ real 0m0.623s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.100s

2. 2.4.10-pre10aa1

# time /bin/cp * /tmp/ real 0m8.952s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.190s

3. 2.4.10-pre11

# time /bin/cp * /tmp/ real 0m8.851s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.170s - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Dec 15 2001 - 21:00:24 EST