Steve,
Do you use a 10k RPM SAS hard drive? Could you share that what test
tools(or test cases) are you using to do the block IO test? We have a
LSI SAS1068E chip and 10k RPM SAS hard drive in our lab. I'll find
some time to reproduce the issue and do some investigation.

Thanks,
Forrest

On 12/4/07, Steven Pratt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I was doing some performance comparisons between the aic94xx sas adapter
> and the mptsas (lsi1078 chip) and saw that performance was slightly
> lower on lsi using the same drive. One thing I noticed the mptsas driver
> was only setting sg_tablesize to 40 which restricts the maximum size of
> the IO to 160kb.  This is inefficient and so I changed it to 255 (max
> value) for testing purposes.  The results were not what I expected.
> While CPU efficiency was improved at the larger block sizes (like I had
> hopped), there were drastic improvements at small (<16k) block sizes
> which is completely surprising).  So I decided to see where all the time
> was being spent.  When doing oprofile, loss of idle ticks was confusing
> things so I booted with idle=poll, and magically the original mptsas
> driver now performs like the modified version at the small block sizes.
> My suspicion is that we have some some sleep delay which is minimized by
> going into poll mode, but I have no idea why changing the sg_tablesize
> gives the same results regardless of poll mode.  I should reiterate that
> I am not talking about small difference. This is 2x performance at 1/3 cpu.
>
> Also, is there any reason we can't increase sg_tablesize for mptsas?
>
> Any thoughts or experiments to try are welcome.
> Steve
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