On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 06:09:51PM +0100, Stefan Wurstbauer wrote:
> Hi all,
>   
>  
> I'm running NetBSD 3.0 on a Dell PowerEdge 4600 server. The disks are
> 4 scsi disks / raid 5 on a hardware raid controller, mounted as a ffs
> filesystem (without softdeps). 
>  
> When I, for example, extract pkgsrc.tgz I take ages to complete.

*What* disks?  *What* "hardware RAID controller"?

A lot of hardware RAID controllers are really quite awful, especially
for small, synchronous writes (which is what you'll get, with FFS
without softdep).

Thor



My controller is a Dell PERC 3/Di and I use 74 GB Disks Scsi U160.
See dmesg output below.

Stefan



aac0 at pci1 dev 8 function 1: Dell PERC 3/Di
aac0: interrupting at ioapic1 pin 4 (irq 10)
aac0: i960RX at 100MHz, 128MB mem (118MB cache), optional battery present
aac0: Kernel 2.7-1 [Build 3170], Monitor 2.7-1 [Build 3170], S/N C410D3
aac0: Controller supports:
55c<WCACHE,DATA64,HOSTTIME,WINDOW4GB,SOFTERR,SGMAP64>
ld0 at aac0 unit 0: RAID 1 (Mirror)
ld0: 17355 MB, 8815 cyl, 64 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 35544576 sectors
ld1 at aac0 unit 1: RAID 5
ld1: 136 GB, 17847 cyl, 255 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 286714368 sectors