SUMMARY: Poor performance on new ?faster? HD?

From: Grant Schoep (grant@storm.com)
Date: Thu Mar 18 1999 - 10:50:25 CST


Thanks to the following for quick responses:
Jed Dobson
TImothy P. Peterman
Harvey Wamboldt
John Robens
Richard Skelton
Moshe Bar
        
        I was having problems with access to a 18 gig drive, that wasn't being as
fast as a 9gig drive. IN this case, seek performance was the higest
priority. Merly do to the the physical properties, large sized drives like
this 18gig drive are slower in seeks because the heads need to move
farther. It did write faster, but the seeks performance lacked. I tried a
number of configuration settings for inode size, and minfree, and settings
optimizing for time, but nothing helped our performance problem.
        I can't further play around with different configurations because the
machines had to go into full time service for now. What I am planning on
doing next time is to get a few smaller drives, maybe 2 9gig drives or 4
4gig drives and stripe them together, and use something like the Veritas
filesystem. I wasn't really part of the purchasing decision when they
bought this 18gig drive we had to work with. Well, next machine we build
that needs to reading/archiving ability I will be sure to put my 2 cents in
on what we budget for a filesystem.
        Thanks again. I really didn't solve my problem, but then I didn't think
there was much I could do in the first place without spending a few more
bucks.
                -grant

_--original Message----
        We have an archiving process that runs and needed alot of diskspace. The
performace was always good with the 9gig drive that came with our Ultra-60.
We recently added in a SUN18G drive to give us more space since our we
needed lots of loggin space.
        However, the 18G drive seems to be slower than the 9gig drive. It won't
work for our archiving program becuase it needs a fast drive. The 18G drive
is a 7200 rpm drive and the 9gig was only 5400rpm. I beleive they are the
same SCSI type.
        The 9gig drive was formatted by Solaris 2.5.1 instal, and the 18gig was
just formatted with default newfs params. Note: This partition MUST be left
as an 18 gig partition.
        Is there a better way to format the drive to make it faster? Everything on
this drive will 5+ meg files. I believe setting the inode higher would
help. Unfortunatly, we can't add any 3rd party filesystems like VxFS, so we
are just using UFS. I also wanted to try something like DiskPak, but we
can't add any more products to this soon-to-be-delivered system.

A few questions then.
        1.What would be good file system settings for this drive.
        2. Is there a way I can see what the current block size, inode size, etc is?

Thanks for any help. Customer demo coming up real soon and I need to figure
out a way to speed this up.

Drive Product ID are here.
9gig = DDRS39130SUN9.0G and it looks like the manufact is IBM
18GIG = MAA3182S SUN18G and it looks like the manufactis Fujitsu.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grant Schoep, grant@storm.com
System/Network Administrator
L3 Communications Telemetry & Instrumentation
San Jose,CA (408)271-0800, Ext. 135



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