On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Peter L. Ashford wrote:

1.  Disk controllers (get off the motherboard IDE, dump the FastTrak, use
	Master only)

fasttrak is nothing more than an ultra version with an special bios
if you don't use this raid bios, there is no difference (for linux)

2.  I/O bandwidth (multiple PCI buses)

sure this helps, but he is not even getting near the pci bus
limitations...

3.  Memory bandwidth (switch to something like a P4)

my old dual p2-500 had didn't have this problem
(i'm 'the friend' look at the last benchmark (5*80gb raid5)

4.  Disks (this is where your friend's dual Xeon system is)

eh, disks are not really his problem
(he is getting 30mb/sec with hdparm for each disk, but getting same result
for his /dev/md0)

Your network probably belongs in this list somewhere, but you didn't

he didn't test any network performance yet, this is just plain disk
benchmarking...

26MB/S (there should be almost no difference for the BB drives).  My
suggestion would be to remove the FastTrak, and get two Ultra-100s and an
Ultra-133 (or one Ultra-100 and two Ultra-133s).  Use one disk per channel

there is absolutly no performance difference between an fasttrak-100 and
an ultra-100

here benchmark from my system with an fasttrak-tx4 (same card jonathan
has) with WD1800BB :

/dev/hde:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.28 seconds =457.14 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.37 seconds = 46.72 MB/sec

WD1800BB on onboard ultra100 controller :

/dev/hdo:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.28 seconds =457.14 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.58 seconds = 40.51 MB/sec

WD1800BB on onboard ultra33 controller :

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.28 seconds =457.14 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.55 seconds = 25.10 MB/sec

quoted

His raid:

<SNIP>

99MB/S block write, 178MB/S block read

This MUST have had a better disk controller system AND multiple PCI buses.
The limit of one PCI bus (32-bit/33MHz, as used by the Promise
controllers) is 133MB/S, and they are exceeding that.

correct, 3 pci busses

but my old system was only 1 pci bus (same mainbord Jonathan is using)
but was getting way higher performance (his raid is getting lower
performance than an single disk)
with only 150mhz more per cpu