
Debugging performance issues 14
Benchmarking through a filesystem
Issue
Although using a filesystem is necessary for most storage deployments, it involves additional work to access
the data stored on the IO Accelerator. These additional lookups decrease maximum system performance
when compared to the benchmark results achieved by benchmarking directly on the block device.
Solution
When you are running micro-benchmarks to vet system performance, you should benchmark by accessing
the block device directly. Otherwise, use any application-native filesystem implementation, possibly testing a
handful where available. HP testing has shown XFS to be reasonably fast under most circumstances. For
Linux, HP recommends using the XFS filesystem.
Slow performance using RAID5 on Linux
Issue
The native Linux implementation of RAID5 is verified to have performance issues with the IO Accelerator. The
Linux RAID5 configuration is believed to use a single thread/single CPU to perform the needed parity
calculations inherent in running a RAID5 system.
Solution
An alternate RAID stack might provide better performance. Additionally, IO Accelerators might be
configured to operate in a RAID10 solution.
Using CP and other system utilities
Issue
Most traditional system utilities, such as CP and rsync, are built with slow legacy storage in mind. They do
not achieve optimal performance from the IO Accelerator like well-tuned applications.
This is not to say that the IO Accelerator does not work well with standard utilities. It is still much faster than
traditional storage using the same utilities, and additional performance benefits will be available in the future
as these utilities are optimized for high-performance storage.
Solution
Avoid using traditional system utilities for general benchmarking purposes, as they are not a good
representation of peak performance.
ext4 in Kernel.org 2.6.33 or earlier might silently
corrupt data when discard (trim) is enabled
CAUTION: HP does not support the use of ext4 in Kernel.org 2.6.33 or earlier. Ext4 in
Kernel.org 2.6.33 or earlier might silently corrupt data when discard is enabled.
The ext4 filesystem in the Kernel.org kernel 2.6.33 and earlier contains a bug where the data in a portion of
a file might be improperly discarded (set to all 0x00) under some workloads. Use Version 2.6.34 or newer
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