[dm-devel] How to track down abysmal performance ata - raid1 - crypto - vg/lv - xfs

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 12:25:26PM +0200, Dominik Brodowski wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> many thanks for your feedback. It seems the crypto step is the culprit:
> 
> Reading 1.1 GB with dd, iflag=direct, bs=8k:
> 
> /dev/sd*                35.3 MB/s       ( 90 %)
> /dev/md*                39.1 MB/s       (100 %)
> /dev/mapper/md*_crypt    3.9 MB/s       ( 10 %)
> /dev/mapper/vg1-*        3.9 MB/s       ( 10 %)
> 
> The "good" news: it also happens on my notebook, even though it has a
> different setup (no raid, disk -> lv/vg -> crypt). On my notebook, I'm
> more than happy to test out different kernel versions, patches etc.
> 
> /dev/sd*                17.7 MB/s       (100 %)
> /dev/mapper/vg1-*       16.2 MB/s       ( 92 %)
> /dev/mapper/*_crypt      3.1 MB/s       ( 18 %)

The good news is that you have it tracked down, the bad news is that
I know very little about dm-crypt.  Maybe the issue is the single
threaded decryption in dm-crypt?  Can you check how much CPU time
the dm crypt kernel thread uses?