[OpenIndiana-discuss] Initial install of 2020.10 on Z840 for production use

[Reginald Beardsley]

I've done a fresh install using the text installer on a 14 core E5-2680 V4 system with 72 GB of ECC DRAM and a 4x 4 TB 7200 rpm RAIDZ2 array.  With reconfigure set on the post install boot it all came up fine.

The prior install of 2021.04-rc1 gave ~220 MB/s for reads and writes and 87 MB/s for a file copy on a 3 disk RAIDZ1 for a 1 TB file size.  A dev/zero write is running very much slower than 2021.04-rc1.  On that it took a little over an hour.  This write has been running for almost 4 hrs.

With a dd write of 1 TB of  /dev/zero to a file running, the GUI response is appallingly slow.  Minutes to bring up Firefox. 18 seconds to open a MATE terminal.  Unblanking the screen took almost 1 minute to bring up the screensaver login.

Top shows the ARC consuming 52 GB and about 10 GB free with the CPU 95% idle.  This seems to me very strange for the response I'm getting.

Relative to my Z400s or my NL40 this thing is a complete dog. It's about what an 11/780 which is badly thrashing would do.   I assume that there are system  parameters which need to be modified.  Reducing the size of the ARC seems the most probable first step.  For my prior testing I only had 8 GB of DRAM on a single DIMM.  I installed 4x of the fastest new Micron 16 GB DIMMs as specified by the Crucial website plus the 8 GB DIMM it came with.

"mdump -e" shows no events except for 3x pci.fabric events per boot which I assume are related to missing device drivers.

After the write completes, I am going to remove the 8 GB DIMM.

Reg