need troubleshooting help to track down a xfsdatad or hardware problem

[david at lang.hm]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Neff, Bryan wrote:

> This is an issue with your controller disabling write cache - not an XFS
> issue.
>
> If your 3Ware Battery Backup Unit is not working, or is not sufficiently
> charged, the controller will disable drive write cache.
> Also, if your array is in a degraded state, the controller will disable
> write cache.
> You can change this behavior by changing the storsave policy.

thanks, the $#%@#$ vendor shipped all 20 systems without battery backup, 
and apparently couldn't even configure them consistantly.

David Lang

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xfs-bounces at oss.sgi.com [mailto:xfs-bounces at oss.sgi.com] On Behalf
> Of david at lang.hm
> Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 2:37 PM
> To: xfs at oss.sgi.com
> Subject: need troubleshooting help to track down a xfsdatad or hardware
> problem
>
> I have 20 identical boxes that have a 16 drive raid 6 array (3ware
> controller), on 17 of the boxes everything seems fine, but on 3 of the
> boxes the xfsdatad process appears to be having problems writing to the
> drive (iostat shows 5MB throughput), and a huge amount of data ends up
> buffered in memory, but cannot get written out to the disk.
>
> what can I do to figure out if the problem is somewhere in software or
> in
> hardware (and if hardware, any ideas how to figure out what is happening
>
> on these 3 boxes)
>
> David Lang
>
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