> 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...

I do not really like RAID-5 either. I definitely like the concept of
RAID-1 much better for the same reasons. This Xeon system is actually
supposed to allow me to get rid of my RAID-5 in the P4.

> 
>   | > (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 am sure running dd while compiling does not give a very accurate
impression but I ran it anyway and got around 8.25 MB/s. I will try it
later when it is not compiling.

>   | 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...

That is what I was hoping. Something is gravely wrong with my setup.

Bryan