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Ways to improve performance with drives in RAID 10
I have a server with 4 regular hard drives in RAID 10 configuration. I choose RAID 10 because I thought I would get better performance than with a single drive and some redundancy at the same time, but write speeds are quite poor. Are there any settings or something in Linux that can help improve disk performance with this configuration? It's software RAID btw. Thanks!
Comments
No offense, but maybe it's time to open a 1 thread, where you could ask your 101 question as also share some goods?
Don't you have anything else to do than being such an idiot?
Use our Raid7™ setup instead for just $7
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Zfs ? Mdadm?
Go with zfs, mdadm is really bad.
tf is this
Mdadm, it's already all set up. Is there anything that can be done without reinstalling everything? Like some tweaks that can speed it up a bit?
Please give me an idea on slow speed.
A yabs , disk test only
Actually yes.
You can do a thing called short stroking. You limit the movement of the drive heads to a smaller amount of the drive surface. This is as easy as this. Partition the drive so that the first partition is say 33% or less of the total space available.
This only works on mechanical drives. You can still use the rest of the space with more partitions
The only other way is to add drives to the array
You can disable bitmap
mdadm --grow --bitmap=none /dev/md
but if you disable it, it will just make rebuilding RAID slower, but overall performance will improve
CalmDown.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! There's some improvement in the numbers:
And the app (Nextcloud) seems somewhat more responsive now.
Are there any other magical settings like this that can help further?
I really do not like your values, but i never used mdadm.
It is like your HDD cache is disabled or you have 5400 RPM drives, not sure I can get that low even on that.
Not even raid 5/6 is that slow, and that has overhead for parity calculation.
I would investigate this further,
In a raid 10 of 4 drives:
write speed is N-2
read speed is N
N = number of total drives.
I wonder if the drives are oldish or something like that? This is an OVH dedicated server I bought for Nextcloud only due to the amount of storage for the price (21e/mo for 4 x 2TB of storage). The app seems to work "decently" well but it would be nice if I could improve the performance further without rebuilding the array. Is there any diagnostic tool or something like that I could use to investigate if there is a performance bottleneck?
@vitobotta
I would help you out further, but my taxi just arrived, I have to go to "party" for 2024.
Have no clue on OVH drive policy, but if you do not have data on it, just do a ZFS and do not waste any more time.
Maybe someone can help you debug this, I personally, would go for ZFS on Software raid.
AA, just remembered, filesystem? try out XFS. It is much better than EXT4 at handling read and write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS )
Thanks, will do some reading since I haven't used ZFS/XFS before and perhaps rebuild the server. Enjoy your party!
@vitobotta - can you paste output of
cat /proc/mdstat(shouldn't be anything sensitive but feel free to mask if you're concerned)Are your drives still syncing by any chance?
Sure, here it is
No, here is no syncing happening AFAIK.
More performance ....
As always in IT. It depends.
In this case it looks like a pure SoftRAID. So not very much performance increase.
So the performance increase here depends on if its softraid, hw raid, block size, cache of your raid, and overall settings of raid card. etc etc
But indeed looks very bad, so uhm...
The server is quite cheap, so probably I am expecting a bit too much from these disks?
Is it HD or SSD?
Brrr, calm down, i told, no offense, and you being an aggro. C'mon, don't be a dick, i was not offending you nor insulted. If you have something against my words, just DM and we will resolve your issue.
HDD
No offense? It feels like I am dealing with children here.
I am TIRED of comments like yours. TIRED. What kind of "advice" (if you want to call it that way) is to put threads that have nothing to do with each other in a single thread? How useless are these comments? And it's not the first time. It's happening often lately and again I'm TIRED. You and others who have fun pointing the finger each time I open a thread without any consideration for the value/meaning/usefulness of the thread, as if I were a spammer, then take your precious time to add useless and totally irrelevant comments to the same threads. What's wrong with you people? Are you wishing that I leave the community or what the hell? How on earth is me opening a thread on RAID issues - that again has nothing to do with other threads I have opened previously - affecting you or those other people? My question is still valid, do you really have nothing better to do than chasing me from thread to thread just to annoy me? I can't believe that ONCE AGAIN people like you bring NOTHING useful for the topic. NOTHING.
Could only guess if its some older HD or many hours on it that one of them is going slow and causing bottleneck to the complete array.. Try check with smart
As its ovh i guess it has enough hours. But yea, not many ways to improve it with softraid.
Ouch... I checked with smartmontools and all the drives have a lot of metrics flagged with "Old_age" and others "Pre-fail"
Software raid on spinning disks is hardly ideal.
To get much better performance add a hardware raid card with 512mb or 1 GB of onboard cache plus a bbu (so you can enable write back cache without risk of data loss).
It's a cheap OVH dedi, I don't think it's possible to add a raid card etc
Perf looks fine to me, don’t forget YABS tests read/write simultaneously so HDDs will appear significantly slower than when read/write are tested separately
Yeah software 10 on spinning drives mostly just is what it is. You’d be better off with SSDs.
But if you need help destroying a RAID10 array let me know.
Any better benchmark?
I experienced some slow performance as well on ovh sata disks with raid 1 software but I don't think it was as slow as you are reporting. Sorry I don't have the numbers off hand. If I do get a chance, I will run it so you can compare but that server is going to expire in a few days and my kid is likely not going to allow me to use my computer to get you these numbers this evening. Moved to the SSDs for my case but I understand why you might not since you're looking likely for space vs bang for buck.