I replaced the hardware on my server a few months back and I have been noticing some significant slow-downs since. I have a server that I primarily use as a NAS device running Samba. I have it running Gentoo and it is all stable, but since I replaced the hardware, it is running dog slow...

The hardware that I had before was an Athlon XP 2000+, 1.5GB DDR400 RAM, (4) 500GB SATA2 HDD attached to a PCI RAID card in a RAID5 configuration, (1) 80GB PATA HDD for root, home, and any other partitions to run the system. It was running on an MSI motherboard that I bought back in 2003, and it had been having some intermittent issues and since it was old hardware I assumed it was going bad. With this hardware, I was able to get approximately 20MB/s transfer speeds to my desktop over Gigabit, but with my new motherboard I'm only able to get 8-10MB/s max.

The new motherboard is a VIA motherboard with onboard dual gigabit ethernet ports, 1GB DDR400, and the same hard drives/RAID card. Overall, I like how well the system runs, but the hard drive performance has been in the toilet since I switched the system around. I am just using genkernel on the system because I was too lazy to custom configure the system, and I didn't reinstall when I replaced the motherboard. Here is the output of lspci, hdparm, and ethtool.

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 IDE
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 90)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 90)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to ISA Bridge
00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Internal Module Bus
00:13.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 Host Bridge
00:13.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700 PCI to PCI Bridge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. CX700M2 UniChrome PRO II Graphics (rev 03)
02:01.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40718 (SATA 300 TX4) (rev 02)
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8110SC/8169SC Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
02:06.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8110SC/8169SC Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
80:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio Controller (rev 10)

ethtool:

Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: pumbg
Wake-on: g
Current message level: 0x00000033 (51)
Link detected: yes

hdparm -Tt /dev/md0 (my raid5 device)

/dev/md0:
Timing cached reads: 440 MB in 2.00 seconds = 219.71 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 180 MB in 3.03 seconds = 59.46 MB/sec

hdparm on my root disk (not part of the raid)

/dev/hdc:
Timing cached reads: 444 MB in 2.00 seconds = 221.53 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 130 MB in 3.02 seconds = 43.06 MB/sec

Are these results normal? I was expecting the system to be slower, but not this much slower. For a point of comparison, I've included the output of hdparm on my desktop system (Intel C2D 2.33GHz, 4GB DDR2, (3) 250GB PATA disks in a raid5 with (1) 300gb disk as root)

hdparm on my desktop:

/dev/md0:
Timing cached reads: 5474 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2740.55 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 358 MB in 3.00 seconds = 119.17 MB/sec

Any help or guidance that could be provided would be greatly appreciated! I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to remedy this situation and it is quite annoying!

-jalsk

Arrgg..., hdparm is very unreliable with benchmarking and you shouldn't for sure run hdparm benchmarks on the raid as the software raid doesn't have a clue about what you're trying to do. Here an example of me running hdparm in sequence on my raid5 (4 2.5 HDDs, 250GB each):
You see - the results are a mess. But I know I can write normal files with 120MB/s

Try with...
...which will write 2GB of zeros to your raid and monitor with something else (e.g. gkrellm2) the write rate (gives me 80MB/s back on my 2.5 HDDs).
I am saying this because I had deep problems (which I wasn't able to solve) with NFS on Gentoo. Somehow the bigger the file, the longer it took to read/write it with huge I-am-waiting-for-something-gaps. It might have something to do with timeouts of NFS reads/writes.
So, have a deeper look at your raid before pointing the finger at it.
(And only chickens use genkernel )
(And only people with suicide tendencies don't have a look at the kernel config after replacing the motherboard - sorry )

Ok, I recompiled my kernel using the latest sources from portage, but I'm still getting really low performance (7-9MB/s transfer speeds). The way that I'm testing this is by using scp over a gigabit connection from my desktop to my server. When I copy from my desktop to my laptop (still using gigabit), copies top out around 25-30MB/s, and with my old hardware I could get around 20MB/s using a PCI gigabit network card. I suppose the issue could be related to network drivers, but I'm not sure. I should be using the right driver, and ethtool reports that I'm connected at gigabit. Ever since I replaced the motherboard on this system I have been getting really slow speeds, so it may also be that I'm running it off of a PCI IDE RAID card, but I don't know.

Here is a link to the exact motherboard I bought:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130106

Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

So, you replaced an Athlon XP 2000+ with a Via Eden CPU? Well, if this is true the low speed is most probably due to the CPU usage. This because ssh-encrypted connections (this includes scp) generate a lot of computations.
VIA CPUs are not very powerful - I have a PC with a VIA Eden 730Mhz and the maximum transfer rate I can achieve using scp to copy a file is 4.9 MB/s.
If you want to achieve higher throughput you'll have to buy another motherboard or use a protocol to transfer your files which doesn't encrypt the stream, like NFS or Samba/CIFS.
Greetings.

Thanks for the response. I was slowly coming to that realization myself actually. I copied some files using smb and was able to get up to 15 MB/s. I guess my motherboard just can't handle gigabit speeds even though it has dual gigabit network cards. Oh well. Thanks for the response though! I guess this solves the mystery.

-jalsk

You're welcome!
Yeah, it's a pity that that motherboard has that kind of disadvantage.
Well, as a last resource you could have a look if your MB has an encryption-chip built-in and see if it is possible to couple if with SSH (somehow get & install the drivers and compile ssh to make it use it) to take advantage of it. I do have such a chip on mine, but to be honest I didn't look at that yet - don't have such a need for the time being.