8.04 super slow on dell 2550

[Sebastien Estienne]

Have you applied all the firmware upgrade to this server BIOS + raid controller?

Sebastien Estienne



On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 17:16, Jason Joines <joines at as.okstate.edu> wrote:
> Sebastien Estienne wrote:
>> try benchmarking with a jaunty live cd mounting you hardy partition so
>> you can test a newer kernel
>>
>> --
>> Sebastien E.
>>
>>
>> Le 27 avr. 09 à 20:15, Jason Joines <joines at as.okstate.edu> a écrit :
>>
>>>      I have a dell 2550 server that I want to get Ubuntu on.  I
>>> tried a
>>> few months ago with the initial 8.04 release and the install was so
>>> slow
>>> I gave up.  I had tried the mini.iso cd, desktop cd, server cd, and
>>> alternate cd with the same results.
>>>
>>>      Recently I decided to try again with the 8.04.2 media and just
>>> let
>>> it keep running.  Instead of assuming it had timed out I would go
>>> check
>>> on it once a day and after many days it was finally installed.  As an
>>> example of the slow install, when using the text install and at the
>>> point where the dialog said "Installing the base system" it took 66
>>> minutes to go from a 33% status to a 39% status.  Also, by watching
>>> logs
>>> it seemed that the package retrieval from the internet was really fast
>>> but it became super slow any time it was "unpacking".
>>>
>>>      The system has a broadcom1 Gbps nic, two pentium III 933 cpu's, 1
>>> GB of RAM, three 74 GB u160 scsi drives configured as raid 0 via the
>>> builtin dell raid controller which is using the aacraid module.  I've
>>> tried both ext3 and xfs as the filesystem.
>>>
>>>      This system was running windows server 2k3 and wasn't noticeably
>>> slow.  I also have an identical system that is running Ubuntu 7.10 and
>>> it seems to be over three times as fast via these simple tests:
>>>
>>>      7.10 System running 2.6.22 kernel
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1k count=1048576
>>> 1048576+0 records in
>>> 1048576+0 records out
>>> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.5587 seconds, 36.3 MB/s
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1M count=1024
>>> 1024+0 records in
>>> 1024+0 records out
>>> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.1349 seconds, 36.9 MB/s
>>>
>>>      8.04.2 System running 2.6.24 kernel
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1M count=1024
>>> 1024+0 records in
>>> 1024+0 records out
>>> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 98.4516 s, 10.9 MB/s
>>>
>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1k count=1048576
>>> 1048576+0 records in
>>> 1048576+0 records out
>>> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 93.9246 s, 11.4 MB/s
>>>
>>>
>>>      I found this bug report
>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/249964 about
>>> these
>>> smp systems having the aacraid driver hang under high load.  However,
>>> this box isn't under any load and I haven't had any of the log
>>> messages
>>> reported.  I decided to try the fix anyway so I recompiled the kernel
>>> after changing:
>>> #define AAC_MAX_32BIT_SGBCOUNT  ((unsigned short)256)
>>> to
>>> #define AAC_MAX_32BIT_SGBCOUNT  ((unsigned short)127)
>>> in aacraid.  It didn't help.
>>>
>>>      I also tried disabling smp via "maxcpus=1" in grub.  It did
>>> disable
>>> smp but it didn't help.
>>>
>>>      Any suggestions?
>>>
>>>
>>> Jason Joines
>>> =================================
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ubuntu-server mailing list
>>> ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com
>>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server
>>> More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
>>
>
>
>     I booted from a 9.04 cd and ran dd from the installer shell.  The
> kerenel was 2.6.28.  I got the same results as far as speed is
> concerned.  However, I was eventually able to generate the errors and
> hang reported by others in the bug report:
>
> aacraid: Host adapter abort request (2,0,0,0)
> aacraid: Host adapt reset request. SCSI hang?
>
>     Is this a vanilla kernel bug or Ubuntu specific?  I need to get
> this box up and running so if another distribution doesn't have the bug
> I could change.
>
>
> Jason
> ===========
>
>
> --
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