Re: Testing Sandforce SSD

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Yeb Havinga <yebhavinga(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Yeb Havinga wrote:
>
>> Due to the LBA remapping of the SSD, I'm not sure of putting files that
>> are sequentially written in a different partition (together with e.g.
>> tables) would make a difference: in the end the SSD will have a set new
>> blocks in it's buffer and somehow arrange them into sets of 128KB of 256KB
>> writes for the flash chips. See also http://www.anandtech.com/show/2899/2
>>
>> But I ran out of ideas to test, so I'm going to test it anyway.
>>
> Same machine config as mentioned before, with data and xlog on separate
> partitions, ext3 with barrier off (save on this SSD).
>
> pgbench -c 10 -M prepared -T 3600 -l test
> starting vacuum...end.
> transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
> scaling factor: 300
> query mode: prepared
> number of clients: 10
> duration: 3600 s
> number of transactions actually processed: 10856359
> tps = 3015.560252 (including connections establishing)
> tps = 3015.575739 (excluding connections establishing)
>
> This is about 25% faster than data and xlog combined on the same
> filesystem.
>
>
The trick may be in kjournald for which there is 1 for each ext3 journalled
file system. I learned back in Red Hat 4 pre U4 kernels there was a problem
with kjournald that would either cause 30 second hangs or lock up my server
completely when pg_xlog and data were on the same file system plus a few
other "right" things going on.

Given the multicore world we have today, I think it makes sense that
multiple ext3 file systems, and the kjournald's that service them, is faster
than a single combined file system.

Greg