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All-in-one Performance Issues?

R

ripken204

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2007
Messages
1,427
E3-1220
Supermicro X9SCM-F
4x4GB ECC
9211-8i
8x3TB hitachi 3TB - RAID-Z2
OpenIndiana 151
ESXi 4.1
napp-it 0.500

a few days ago i ran bonnie from napp-it and the results were not good
bonnie-test1.jpg


i just ran bonnie again, im assuming these results are good?
bonnie-test2.jpg


i then ran dd bench from napp-it, these results also seem good
dd-bench-1.jpg



so tonight everything seems to be alright. nothing has changed at all from the first bonnie test to the second bonnie test, the server has been off, which makes the results from the first bonnie benchmark a bit odd... how could the results differ so much when nothing has changed.

how normal is it for the cpu to run near 100% while bonnie benching?
it seems to be just single threaded, this may have been the issue the first time?

here is an image during the second bonnie test:
bonnie-test2-cpu.jpg


I currently have only 2 vCPU's assigned to OI, I'm assuming this is fine? would it be good/bad to give it 4 vCPU's ?
is my cpu possibly just too weak?
do my results above seem fine?
any suggestions on performance tuning?
 
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CPU figures taken from inside a VM is highly inaccurate, it's better if you check from the vsphere gui.
 
it was during the bonnie benchark, so i am assuming the ZFS calculations or something was killing the cpu
 
unless the benchmark for some reason stresses the cpu... it definitely seems like the cpu is a limiting factor since it is being maxed out.

i will run the benchmark again and take a look at the processes

edit:
bonnie++ is using ~49% of the cpu (i gave the VM 2 vProcs), also only about 1GB or ram out of 10GB assigned to the VM is free.
about to test with more and less ram for different results

well this doesnt make much sense, i give it 5GB ram instead of 10GB and it benches faster in reads?

bonnie-test3-5gb-ram.jpg
 
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My skepticism was not that the bench is not cpu intensive - but that I doubted ZFS overhead was the issue. Your CPU is a pretty studly one.
 
and now for some reason after adjusting the ram down to 5gb, i cant increase it to over 5gb

the resource allocation tab says
Reservation: 5gb
Configured: 10gb

i just changed it back to 10gb.. but apparently if configured>reservation then the VM wont boot

edit:
nvm, apparently if i want to increase ram size, i have to change it in two places...

how much ram is recommended to give to ZFS?
 
You shouldn't even be setting RAM reservation. Unless your ram is grossly overcommitted, just assign it what you want it to use. Give ZFS as much as you can spare - 4GB is a recommended minimum,
 
i never set the reservation, apparently it did it on its own
i did set the configured ram though
right now i have both set to 10GB
 
Ah, I think I know. Do you have the 9211-8i passed thru? If so, ESXi will force assigned RAM to be reserved.
 
what other VMs are there? you have 16gb ram. what else (if anything) is in use? fyi: assigning a large amount of ram will not improve performance of a single threaded benchmark...
 
just an ubuntu vm at the moment which i will be using mostly for web development
i am definitely going to find other things to do with this machine, but nothing intensive at the moment
 
well i'm not using it right now, i need to find a free weekend to set everything up and transfer data over from my old server.
 
No, I mean how much is assigned to other VMs? e.g. the ubuntu VM. Or are you saying nothing else was running at the time you tested vs 10GB ram?
 
nothing else was running at that time because i wanted to see the full speed of the drives, i have ubuntu on the zfs array
 
just as the all-in-one guide says
OI controls the zfs array, acts as a SAN
there is a datastore on the array, and ubuntu is installed onto that datastore
 
Okay, cool. How many threads for OI? My xeon has HT turned on, and I assigned two "cpus" to OI.
 
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