>>>>> On Thu, 18 May 2006 19:16:45 +0800 (PHT),
      "Joseph A. Dacuma" <jadacuma@ched.gov.ph> said:

> Hi All!
> Anyone on the list using the ciss driver? Its being tested on an HP
> Proliant DL380 G3 server with a Smart Array 5i controller. Preliminary
> findings reveal that I/O operation is very slow. This applies to both RAID
> 1 configuration using 2 disks and RAID 5 using 6 disks.

> Due to its crawling read/write performance, I tried to install OpenBSD 3.9
> on the same machine using same configurations above. To my surprise, ciss
> driver of OpenBSD 3.9 performs better on both RAID 1 and 5 --albeit, twice
> the speed of I/O operations compared to NetBSD-3 branch.

Mm, that surprises me too.

> Using generic kernels for both variants, simulation using time was
> utilized  to compare the I/O speed difference by upacking an 8.8MB tar.gz
> file from CD. It took 28:41.22 for NetBSD. On OpenBSD 3.9, the operation
> was completed less than half the time clocking at 14:25.03.

Both sounds somewhat slower on a machine today.
On my machine (NetBSD-3.0, Athlon 64 X2 2.2GHz, 2GB memory, 160G IDE
disks, ffs without softdep), unpacking ghostscript-8.51.tar.bz2 source
tarball only took 5.45 seconds (on 7200RPM disk) or 6.07 seconds (on
5400RPM disk), although the source tar ball is from a harddisk instead
of a CD.

> Also, while unpacking the tar.gz file, I noticed that stdout pauses
> invariably after 2-5 screenful of outputs. On OpenBSD's stdout, files,
> while being unpacked flowed smoothly as entire operation ended.

Are you using softdep on both machines?
Does changing vm.bufcache parameter by sysctl make any difference?
-- 
soda