On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 06:23:42AM -0700, Bryan Vyhmeister wrote:
  | I have seen this mentioned several times. That is actually why the 2400A
  | in the P4 is doing RAID-5 instead of RAID-1.

I considered RAID-5, but I am not that short of disk space, and I like
the fact I can take a single disk from a RAID-1 set and use it in
another system as an individual drive for data recovery purposes...


  | > (To put this in perspective, I was getting ~ 40MB/s sequential on a
  | > single drive on a 2400A, and when I mirrored that drive it dropped to
  | > 10MB/s).
  | 
  | What is the best way to test sequential performance?

I was just using dd(1).  There's other benchmarks like bonnie or
postmark in pkgsrc.


  | I think something else must be going on here besides just the disks
  | being slow. I started a snapshot build last night at about 11:30 PM on
  | the Xeon and it is still going now at 6:15 AM. It has only gotten as far
  | as the crypto sources and it seems to be going very, very slowly. I
  | started the same build on the P4 system at about 12:30 AM and it quickly
  | ran into trouble and quit by around 1:30 AM. I am still waiting for the
  | Xeon to run into that error. Sources have been checked out from the same
  | date so the build should also run into an error on the Xeon. I am still
  | baffled as to what could be causing this system to run so slowly.

A Xeon of that speed with 2GB of RAM should be able to run
"./build.sh distribution" in ~ 40 minutes...