from:dong wu
I have made a test in my server!
raid5 capacity:80G,  disks:9
IO type                        IOPS                   speed(M/s)
1024k seq write            40.67                   40.67
512k seq write              70.89                   39.45
256k seq write             36.02                    34.00
128k seq write             134.19                   16.77
64k seq write               232.26                   14.52
32k seq write              160.23                    5.01
16k seq write              148.48                    2.32
8k seq write                151.05                   1.18
4k seq write                151.39                   0.59
2k seq write                 290.90                  0.57
1k seq write                 526.21                  0.51
512B seq write             1076.60                0.53

I don't know why raid5 seq write is so slow.
Does delaying write cause this?

well, 
(1) is raid5 degraded ,recovering or resyncing ?
(2) how is the speed of members ?
(3) how do you test that (tools) and how is the cpu utilization during test?
(4) it seems that you used partitions of disks as raid members, any other read/write operations on other partitions ?
(5) try to set /sys/block/mdX/md/stripe_cache_size larger
(6) XOR calculation too slow?

------------------				 
spren.gm@gmail.com
2010-01-08