After doing intense research, I’m able to confirm that the lethal Kinder Eggs are still availble in Italy. And furthermore, they contain amusing stuff like the construction set and the paper thing on the right, and not just boring figurines.
Let the touristing commence!
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| The magical key! |
Dear Diary,
today the IOPS-unlocking FastPath key arrived for the LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i card arrivied! I was so excited, until I opened the box an found what’s basically something that short-circuits two headers on the RAID card.
What a rip-off. It probably disables some sleep(1) calls in the firmware on the card.
Anyway, I plugged it in, and did the benchmarks, and I got… absolutely no (zero, zip) difference. No difference whatsoever. Zilch. Nada.
So I googled around a bit, and found someone who claimed that the RAID card should be configured as write-through, no read-ahead, direct I/O to make the FastPath stuff be all awesome and stuff.
I did that. Annoyingly enough, there seems to be no way to just flip those settings without rebuilding the RAID, so testing takes a while.
And benchmarking afterwards shows that… throughput drops to one fifth of the standard settings, and random reads of files is absolutely no faster.
I have no more time for benchmarking, since I have to go to Rome. Diary, I’ll continue fiddling with the RAID card when I get back.
But the strangest thing has happened. I was looking through some of the previous pages in my secret diary, and I found that somebody else has been making comments! How is that possible!? Are other people able to read my diary? Is Google betraying my secrets to the world?
Anyway, the comment said that I should perhaps just use the SATA 2.0 connectors on the motherboard to see what IOPS I get without using the MegaRAID card. That makes tons of sense, because I don’t know whether the lack-lustre random read performance I’m getting is because of the disks or the RAID card.
I’ll do that when I get back in about four weeks.
And I’ll see whether I can secure my diary further somehow.
Dear Diary,
after the rather disappointing random read benchmarks (I mean, 4K files a second? It’s pitiful) I almost went into a severe depression and started thinking about using vi. Again.
But then I went back to the hardware pusher’s web site and noticed something strange. They’re selling something that’s supposed to make their LSI MegaRAID 9265 card suck less! It’s apparently a firmware upgrade that removes all the sleep(1) calls in their code! Or something! At least that’s what I got from reading what they’re saying. It’s gonna make the IOPS-es on SSD be three times better!
On the one hand, one could be annoyed that they didn’t just leave out the apparent sleep() calls in the standard firmware. On the other hand, perhaps this is the answer to everything!
Dear Diary, I forked over more money, and I’m now waiting all aflutter for the magical firmware stick to arrive.
Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Oslo. Winter has sort of arrived, at last:
