Hello, Fo years I left the default setting of our HDs IO scheduler. After reading some articles about HW RAID and SAN it seems to me that it is not a good thing to let Linux doing IO scheduling because the HW between him and the HDs have his own IO scheduler.

I will probably run iozone to test with default and NOOP for example but I am curious if someone has some toughts on that subject ?

Given all the ideas on the topic you find in the other posts we did some testing. Results are inconsistent:

- 5% advantage for noop with Dell Perc 4Di hardware raid controller, raid5 of 3 disks, RHEL4.

- 6% disadvantage for noop with RHEL5 running in a VMware ESX 4 based virtual machine. Of course IO-performance of ESX is crap anyways, so that may not really be a valid result. As it is a customers system, I do not remeber the storage make / model.

- More or less no difference with RHEL5 VMs and Xen Dom0 systems attached to multipathed FC SAN, Eonstore RAID enclosures (Raid6 of 8 SAS disks), Qlogic HBAs and FC switches.


However, there is more to think of when it comes to IO performance than the scheduler: various block sizes at different positions of the IO stack: - harddisk block size (used to be 512 byte, but 4k blocks are round the corner...)
- raid controller stripe size and RAID type / layout
- maybe an FC / iSCSI protocol or HBA block size
- LVM stripe size
- filesystem block size
- OS readahead settings

Guess one has to align all of that to achieve maximum performance, we did not extend our test that far yet...

best regards, Gunther

--
Gunther Schlegel
Manager IT Infrastructure


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