under the bonnet question about Unraid 5

[sacretagent]

just a question that came up in my mind about parity syncing / checking

 

when i look at top i always have the feeling that unraid is not using my hardware optimally

 

top - 18:12:16 up 23:02,  2 users,  load average: 1.00, 1.01, 1.00
Tasks:  97 total,   2 running,  95 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.8%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   3049788k total,  2489508k used,   560280k free,    26888k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  2335268k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
17405 root      20   0     0    0    0 R    2  0.0  51:00.41 unraidd
    1 root      20   0   704  332  288 S    0  0.0   0:01.85 init
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd

 

it is like using only 2% of cpu and all other stats are like not moving ....

was just thinking if unraid would be more agressive during this process that things could go faster

since i see nowhere a high load or storage % going up,  do i assume the settings at which speed unraid is doing this is some sort of algorithm

is there a way we can make things faster or does this completely depend on the controllers or pci bus or speed of the slowest hdd ?

 

just interested how the things are setup

[Joe L.]

does this completely depend on the controllers or pci bus or speed of the slowest hdd ?

It entirely depends on the speed of the slowest hdd and throughput on the PCI/PCIe bus.

 

The CPU usage is minimal, as you are seeing in "top." No change to the parity-check "xor" programming will make it go faster.

 

 

[sacretagent]

Thanks Joe L.

 

for confirming my thoughts :0

 

i work in the IT support sector and sometimes i really like to know how things work LOL

with a full blown distro i would have looked at the I/O results but unraid is limiting my limited Linux knowledge even more

 

and although i am not affraid of trying something out on the machine ... i am reluctant to compile anything on the thing .... don't want to mess it up completely

 

[bubbaQ]

with a full blown distro i would have looked at the I/O results

 

All if the I/O results are there, exactly the same on a full distro, in /proc.  What do you think is missing?

[sacretagent]

was looking for something as Sar

 

/var/log/sa

 

most of our clients have this installed as it gives a good indication over time on the load on a server...

 

i know it needs to be installed on slack so probably it is easily installable on Unraid  just didn't look for it yet ... might come when i get bored LOL

[limetech]

You could replace your CPU with a PentiumII and see quite a bit of time taken up by unraidd doing xor 

[Joe L.]

You could replace your CPU with a PentiumII and see quite a bit of time taken up by unraidd doing xor 

But it is hard to find a motherboard with PCIe slots that will take a PentiumII 

 

Joe L.

[bubbaQ]

was looking for something as Sar

 

Sar is a third-party utility (sysstat).  You can install it on unRAID if you want.  See:

 

  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3343.0

 

Sar, like all other performance utilities, gets its data from /proc.

 

You can use vmstat or mpstat (I forget which is in unRAID stock) to get that info.

 

For unRAID 5, I have a plugin using sysstat and ploticus:

 

  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7386.msg71543#msg71543

[MrD1234]

install iostat, it will show you the utilization of your io subsystem