[ofa-general] iSer and Direct IO

[Joe Landman]

Cameron Harr wrote:

> ----
> [root at test05 ~]# sgp_dd dio=1 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fioa bs=512 bpt=2048 
> count=16777216 time=1

This is only 8 GB of IO.  It is possible that (despite dio) you are 
caching.  Make the IO much larger than RAM.  Use a count of 128m or so.


> time to transfer data was 5.556115 secs, 1546.03 MB/sec
> [root at test05 ~]# sg_dd dio=1 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fioa bs=512 bpt=2048 
> count=16777216 time=1
> time to transfer data: 5.565360 secs at 1543.46 MB/sec
> [root at test05 ~]# dd oflag=direct if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fioa bs=1M count=8192
> 8589934592 bytes (8.6 GB) copied, 12.7761 seconds, 672 MB/s

We have found dd to be quite trustworthy with [oi]flag=direct.

> ----
> Using iSer, with the small transfer chunks, sgp_dd has numbers that are in line 
> with what I'd expect for DIO while sg_dd doesn't:
> ---------
> sgp_dd:  200.64 MB/s
> sg_dd:   735.42 MB/s
> dd:     62.3 MB/s
> --------
> But for larger transfers (with 1M block transfers), both sgp_dd and sg_dd show 
> well above what I think I can be getting:
> -------
> sgp_dd: 882.43
> sg_dd:   819.89
> dd:      731 MB/s #Which is still high, and which makes me suspect iSer

We had iSER bouncing from low 200s through 1000 MB/s during testing. 
Very hard to pin down good stable benchmark times.  This was a few 
months ago.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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