On 2008-04-14, Tim Bradshaw <tfb+google@tfeb.org> wrote:
> That's just not right. There are crappier disk systems than the U5/
> U10 had but you'd be hard put to find one, and the 280R certainly is
> not an example. You have some horrible misconfiguration or are
> misidentifying the problem. Use some disk benchmark (bonnie?) to
> establish what the performance problem really is (and in particular to
> establish that it's not I/O).

I'll second that. I recommend to run bonnie [1] on your machines to have
a comparison. Here are the results of a simple bonnie run on our 280R with
two processors at 900 MHz, 4 GB memory, using a Seagate ST373405 SCSI disk
(73.4GB, 10000 RPM, PN 390-0071) with UFS logging, and running Solaris 9:

-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine GB M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
Fire 280R 5 23.3 96.6 32.5 23.4 11.1 11.6 22.5 93.8 63.7 33.4 78 2.7
Fire 280R 10 23.4 97.4 31.9 23.5 12.0 12.6 20.0 83.7 22.7 12.4 31 2.4

We do no longer have any Ultra 5s around. Instead I took a Sun Blade
100 with a 502 MHz processor, 1152 MB memory, using a Seagate ST315310A
(15.3GB, 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/100, PN 370-4154) with UFS logging, running
Solaris 10. I would not expect this box to be slower than a Ultra 5:

-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine GB M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
Blade 100 1 13.6 93.3 22.8 66.7 6.3 22.5 13.3 92.2 39.1 63.8 87 5.9
Blade 100 2 14.2 94.2 27.8 73.9 6.9 24.2 13.0 91.6 37.6 70.9 49 5.2

Andreas.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/bonnie-64/