Re: Extreme slowness with xfs [WAS: Re: Slowness with new pc]

From: Justin Piszcz
Date: Tue Nov 25 2008 - 04:56:34 EST




On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Eric Sandeen wrote:

Stian Jordet wrote:
ma., 24.11.2008 kl. 04.50 -0500, skrev Justin Piszcz:
While there still may be something else wrong, the first problem I see is
your sunit and swidth are set to 0.

Please read, a good article on what they are and how to set them:
http://www.socalsysadmin.com/

Oh, this was new to me. But the setting didn't change anything. I can
copy one large file between the xfs and ext3 disk (both ways), and I get
speeds between 160 and 200 MB/s. But unpacking the kernel source takes
between 5 and 10 minutes on the xfs disk, and a mere 15 seconds on the
ext3... (and it also used to take between 5 and 10 minutes when I had
xfs on the raid0, so it doesn't seem to be hardware related...)

If anyone has anything more I can try before I do the lengthy process of
backup 1TB, reformat and restore...

I don't know if the storage you're on passes barriers or not, but xfs
has barriers on by default, while ext3 does not. ext3 will still likely
win the "untar a kernel" race, but for a fairer test, make the barrier
settings consistent between the two.

-Eric


barriers enabled:

$ time bash -c 'tar xf linux-2.6.27.7.tar; sync'
block 573932: ** Block of NULs **
Total bytes read: 293857280 (281MiB, 1.9MiB/s)

real 2m40.643s
user 0m0.194s
sys 0m1.541s

barriers disabled:

time bash -c 'tar xf linux-2.6.27.7.tar; sync'
block 573932: ** Block of NULs **
Total bytes read: 293857280 (281MiB, 11MiB/s)

real 0m27.612s
user 0m0.182s
sys 0m1.617s


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