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SSD Performance
Anyway to improve the performance of this SSD? Is there anything I should look for in the bios? I know dd isn't the best test but this seems pretty slow.
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CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5680 @ 3.33GHz
Number of cores : 12
CPU frequency : 1596.000 MHz
Total size of Disk : 228.0 GB (1.1 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem : 24101 MB (135 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 24561 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime : 0 days, 10 hour 33 min
Load average : 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
OS : Devuan GNU/Linux ascii
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 4.9.0-6-amd64
I/O speed(1st run) : 127 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run) : 126 MB/s
I/O speed(3rd run) : 127 MB/s
Average I/O speed : 126.7 MB/s
Comments
We have some hard drives that pull 130MB/s, I'd say that is low for SSD for sure
I've heard of using fstrim to trim the SSD to fix slow speeds. I'm sure others on this forum can verify this or give other advice
You could also use smartctl to check the drive age / health, see if its getting any errors
Are you in solusvm? vmware?
that came out on my disks with Vmware but basically with a problem in the RAID controller
Here's the output of smartctl -a /dev/sda: https://clbin.com/SwD9t
Power_On_Hours is 679 days, so not terribly old, but I'm not exactly sure how to interpret the rest of the output.
Also, fstrim was a bust, not sure why:
~/bin# fstrim -v /
fstrim: /: the discard operation is not supported
~/bin#
Neither, it's a dedicated box.
Often RAID controllers won't pass-thru fstrim commands, so performance is going to gradually degrade and shorten the life of the SSD as well. Maybe your controller has some settings you can change, or a firmware update available? A cheap old Crucial MX300 isn't exactly going to be a speed-demon. UserBenchmarks have it at a "SusWrite 215", which is faster than you're getting, but still not too impressive. There's good reason why there are expensive "enterprise" SSDs out there.
Your performance is still going to be better than with an HDD. They do well on sequential tests like DD but fall to almost nothing on highly random (seek) loads.
are you testing with one large file or random small files? they will have different speeds.
Thanks for all the feedback guys. With the help of some commands (lshw) I discovered the drive is plugged into:
*-scsi
description: SCSI storage controller
product: SAS1064ET PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS
vendor: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic
I've asked the provider to move the drive to the ICH10 SATA controller which should get me closer to SATA II speeds (375MB/s):
*-ide:0
description: IDE interface
product: 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller #1
vendor: Intel Corporation
We'll see... 🙄
24GB of swap seems high. I don't know what to suggest, but I'd think like 4-8GB.
Not going to speed up SSD, just reclaim some that would not ever be used.
One very simple thing you could try is switch the scheduler. SSDs works great with deadline or noop:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
If you're using RAID I'd also strongly suggest looking at https://wiki.mikejung.biz/LSI
Some other small optimizations that you could test:
echo 0 > /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nomerges
echo 0 > /sys/block/sda/queue/add_random
Also if doing writes / deletes a lot the SSD might slow down a lot if full, especially if they're consumer drives.
Appreciate the feedback @BunnySpeed. Looks like all those were set. Drive usage is 2.2G out of 256.2G so plenty of free space. Upon further investigation the drive is plugged into a RAID controller that's negotiated a link speed of 1.5Gb rather than the 3Gb it's capable of. Neither myself or the provider know why, they've looked at the bios and the firmware and haven't been able to determine why. I've asked them to plug it into an ICH10 IDE SATA port in the hopes that'll get me closer to 3Gb. Waiting on their reply.
A little late to the party, but don't forget to turn on the drive's write cache. This can be done in controller settings or possibly with hdparm
@FHR thanks, confirmed it's enabled with lsiutil. Provider said they're ordering a cable to move it from the RAID controller to the ICH10 SATA 3Gb/s controller.
Just wanted to provide an update for anyone else that might come across this issue, here's the solution...
Grab a copy of lsiutil (I used v1.62), run it and select the raid controller. Enter option 13. Here, you will be able to set up a minimum and maximum speed for your ports, individually. Just set up 3.0Gbps as minimum speed for all your active ports, leave the rest at default (or existing) parameters/settings.