Re: RAID extremely slow

[Added linux-raid to the CC]

Hi Kevin,

Notes interleaved:

On 07/25/2012 06:52 PM, Kevin Ross wrote:

Hello,

I'm having a problem.  After a while, my software RAID rebuild becomes
extremely slow, and the filesystem on the RAID is essentially blocked. 
I don't know what is causing this.  I guess it could be a bad drive, but
how can I find out?

Probably not.  That pretty much always shows up in dmesg.

I used atop to show the transfer speeds to each drive. Here's a
screenshot:
http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/6484/screenshotfrom201207251.png

Piles of small reads  scattered across multiple drives, and a
concentration of queued writes to /dev/sda.  What's on /dev/sda?
It's not a member of the raid, so it must be some other system task
involved.

[ The output of "lsdrv" [1] might be useful here, along with
"mdadm -D /dev/md0" and "mdadm -E /dev/[b-j]" ]

"smartctl -a" for all the drives looks good to me, no pending failures,
or errors logged.  dmesg doesn't report anything wrong with any of the
drives.  It does, however, report lots of hung tasks, which are trying
to access the RAID volume.  For example:

[51000.672064] INFO: task mythbackend:10677 blocked for more than 120
seconds.
[51000.672098] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs"
disables this message.
[51000.672143] mythbackend     D 0000000e     0 10677      1 0x00000000
[51000.672146]  f38bea00 00000086 c1095415 0000000e 00000002 00000000
00000000 c147aac0
[51000.672152]  f38bebac c147aac0 eb2cff04 003d2f4b 00000000 c109cacb
01872f02 eb2cfe50
[51000.672157]  c100f28b c13df480 01872f02 eb2cfe68 c10532b1 0069a8d0
f79d6ac0 00000000
[51000.672162] Call Trace:
[51000.672169]  [<c1095415>] ? find_get_pages_tag+0x2f/0xa2
[51000.672173]  [<c109cacb>] ? pagevec_lookup_tag+0x18/0x1e
[51000.672176]  [<c100f28b>] ? read_tsc+0xa/0x28
[51000.672179]  [<c10532b1>] ? timekeeping_get_ns+0x11/0x55
[51000.672182]  [<c10536a4>] ? ktime_get_ts+0x7a/0x82
[51000.672186]  [<c12bea8b>] ? io_schedule+0x4a/0x5f
[51000.672188]  [<c1095659>] ? sleep_on_page+0x5/0x8
[51000.672191]  [<c12bedeb>] ? __wait_on_bit+0x2f/0x54
[51000.672193]  [<c1095654>] ? lock_page+0x1d/0x1d
[51000.672196]  [<c1095754>] ? wait_on_page_bit+0x57/0x5e
[51000.672199]  [<c104d171>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x29/0x29
[51000.672201]  [<c1095823>] ? filemap_fdatawait_range+0x71/0x11e
[51000.672205]  [<c109630f>] ? filemap_write_and_wait_range+0x3e/0x4c
[51000.672232]  [<f86bfb39>] ? xfs_file_fsync+0x68/0x214 [xfs]
[51000.672246]  [<f86bfad1>] ? xfs_file_splice_write+0x144/0x144 [xfs]
[51000.672249]  [<c10e7e3b>] ? vfs_fsync_range+0x27/0x2d
[51000.672252]  [<c10e7e52>] ? vfs_fsync+0x11/0x15
[51000.672254]  [<c10e80b8>] ? sys_fdatasync+0x20/0x2e

MythTV is trying to flush recorded video to disk, I presume.  Sync is
known to cause stalls--a great deal of work is on-going to improve
this.  How old is this kernel?

[51000.672258]  [<c12c409f>] ? sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x28
[51000.672261]  [<c12b0000>] ? quirk_usb_early_handoff+0x4a9/0x522

Here is some other possibly relevant info:

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sdh1[0] sdd1[9] sde1[10] sdb1[6] sdi1[7] sdc1[4]
sdf1[3] sdg1[8] sdj1[1]
      6837311488 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [9/9]
[UUUUUUUUU]
      [==========>..........]  resync = 51.3% (501954432/976758784)
finish=28755.6min speed=275K/sec

Is this resync a weekly check, or did something else trigger it?

unused devices: <none>

# cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
10000

MD is unable to reach its minimum rebuild rate while other system
activity is ongoing.  You might want to lower this number to see if that
gets you out of the stalls.

Or temporarily shut down mythtv.

# cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
200000

Thanks in advance!
-- Kevin

HTH,

Phil

[1] http://github.com/pturmel/lsdrv