LSI's sales literature on that card specs "128 devices" which I take with a few 
hearty grains of salt. I agree that with all 46 drives pumping out streamed 
data, the controller would be overworked BUT the drives will only deliver data 
as fast as the OS tells them to. Just because the speedometer says 200 mph max 
doesn't mean we should (or even can!) go that fast.

The IO intensive operations that trigger our timeout issues are a small 
percentage of the actual normal IO we do to the box. Most of the time the 
solution happily serves up archived data, but when it comes time to scrub or do 
mass operations on the entire dataset bad things happen. It seems a waste to 
architect a more expensive performance-oriented solution when you aren't going 
to use that performance the majority of the time. There is a balance between 
performance and functionality, but I still feel that we should be able to make 
this situation work.

Ideally, the OS could dynamically adapt to slower storage and throttle its IO 
requests accordingly. At the least, it could allow the user to specify some IO 
thresholds so we can "cage the beast" if need be. We've tried some manual 
tuning via kernel parameters to restrict max queued operations per vdev and 
also a "scrub" related one (specifics escape me), but it still manages to 
overload itself.
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