8.04 super slow on dell 2550

[Jason Joines]

Jason Joines wrote:
>      I have a dell 2550 server that I want to get Ubuntu on.  I tried a 
> few months ago with the initial 8.04 release and the install was so slow 
> I gave up.  I had tried the mini.iso cd, desktop cd, server cd, and 
> alternate cd with the same results.
> 
>      Recently I decided to try again with the 8.04.2 media and just let 
> it keep running.  Instead of assuming it had timed out I would go check 
> on it once a day and after many days it was finally installed.  As an 
> example of the slow install, when using the text install and at the 
> point where the dialog said "Installing the base system" it took 66 
> minutes to go from a 33% status to a 39% status.  Also, by watching logs 
> it seemed that the package retrieval from the internet was really fast 
> but it became super slow any time it was "unpacking".
> 
>      The system has a broadcom1 Gbps nic, two pentium III 933 cpu's, 1 
> GB of RAM, three 74 GB u160 scsi drives configured as raid 0 via the 
> builtin dell raid controller which is using the aacraid module.  I've 
> tried both ext3 and xfs as the filesystem.
> 
>      This system was running windows server 2k3 and wasn't noticeably 
> slow.  I also have an identical system that is running Ubuntu 7.10 and 
> it seems to be over three times as fast via these simple tests:
> 
>      7.10 System running 2.6.22 kernel
> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1k count=1048576
> 1048576+0 records in
> 1048576+0 records out
> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.5587 seconds, 36.3 MB/s
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1M count=1024
> 1024+0 records in
> 1024+0 records out
> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 29.1349 seconds, 36.9 MB/s
> 
>      8.04.2 System running 2.6.24 kernel
> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1M count=1024
> 1024+0 records in
> 1024+0 records out
> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 98.4516 s, 10.9 MB/s
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=gigfile00 bs=1k count=1048576
> 1048576+0 records in
> 1048576+0 records out
> 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 93.9246 s, 11.4 MB/s
> 
> 
>      I found this bug report 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/249964 about these 
> smp systems having the aacraid driver hang under high load.  However, 
> this box isn't under any load and I haven't had any of the log messages 
> reported.  I decided to try the fix anyway so I recompiled the kernel 
> after changing:
> #define AAC_MAX_32BIT_SGBCOUNT  ((unsigned short)256)
> to
> #define AAC_MAX_32BIT_SGBCOUNT  ((unsigned short)127)
> in aacraid.  It didn't help.
> 
>      Any suggestions?
> 
> 
> Jason Joines
> =================================
> 
> 




     I also tried disabling smp via "maxcpus=1" in grub.  It did disable 
smp but it didn't help.


Jason
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