poor raidframe performance while setting it up

[Bernd Ernesti <netbsd%lists.veego.de@localhost>]

Hi,

I'm trying to setup a raid 1 set with two drives and it takes a very
long time (at least raidframe is telling me that it will take a long
time) to initialize that raid set.

First it seems to be fast with 75MB/s i/o on both drives and then it
slows down very dramatically to 2.5MB/s, so the initail would take 100
till 200 hours for this 1TB raid set. With 75MB/s it would have taken
3-4 hours.
The slow down happens after a few seonds till 2-3 minutes.

I use different drives, where the first one can read with 95MB/s and
the second one with 75MB/s

This is the first time that I have seem such a poor perfomance when
setting up a raid on i386.

Any ideas what goes wrong?

This is the raid config file:

START array
1 2 0
START disks
/dev/wd2e
/dev/wd3e
START layout
32 1 1 1
START queue
fifo 100


I first used 64 1 1 1 for the "START layout" but that didn't make a
difference.

This is the output from sysstat v 1

At the begining:

Disks: seeks xfers bytes %busy
   wd2        4919   77M  48.1
   wd3        4919   77M  73.2

And here the after it slowed down:

Disks: seeks xfers bytes %busy
   wd2          84 1344K   1.0
   wd3         170 2720K   100

wd2 is the faster disk of these two drives.

Bernd