-
Kona LHe + Apple FC card + Mac Pro = slow?
Hi,
Regardless of what configuration I use, I can’t get good RAID performance if I have the Kona LHe card in my Mac Pro. Here are the details:
I have a Mac Pro 3.0 GHz with an ATI x1900 card. It’s running 10.4.8 and the EFI firmware update and is up-to-date with all other updates. I have the Apple fibre channel card. And I have a Kona LHe with the latest 3.2 driver. The Apple FC card is connected to a 2 TB Huge Systems 4105. If the Kona card is in the computer, I can only get 90 MB/s read/write to the array (it’s in a RAID3 config). If I take the Kona card out, I get 170 MB/s. I’ve tried several different PCIe configurations, using the Expansion Slot Utility. Here’s the results:
ESU config 1, no Kona, FC in slot 4 : 170 MB/s
ESU config 2, no Kona, FC in slot 4 : 90 MB/s
ESU config 2, no Kona, FC in slot 3 : 170 MB/s
ESU config 2, Kona in slot 4, FC in slot 3 : 90 MB/s
ESU config 2, Kona in slot 3, FC in slot 4 : 90 MB/sSorry if this is a little cryptic. The “ESU config” bit refers to which of the four PCIe Profiles I’ve got selected in the Expansion Slot Utility. In theory, config 2 is the right one: it gives a x16 slot to the video card and x4 to both slot 4 and slot 3. When the FC card is in a x4 slot, the ESU identifies it as running at full speed – which is good. What’s odd is that without the Kona card, I only get the full 170 MB/s performance if the FC card is in slot 3, even though both slots are x4. And, when I add the Kona into slot 4, performance drops back to 90 MB/s.
Does any have any ideas why this is happening? I’ve got an ATTO card but it doesn’t yet have a driver for the Mac Pro (at least not one that’ll work with more than 2 GB RAM).
Regards,
fh -
12 Replies
-
Even though 90 MB/s is nowhere near what I should be getting, it’s still not horrible when most of the work is DVCPRO HD. However, even with that, I occasionally get the dropped frames error on playback in FCP, when the scratch files are on the RAID. So, that 90 MB/s isn’t 100% reliable – not good.
-
oh boy, Dont know how much help I can be other than to tell you I am also a Mac Pro owner that is getting “dropped frames” errors, even when I am using a raid that is getting good performance scores.
You might want to check out my thread I started a couple days ago:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=861120I did speak to AJA about the dropped frames thing, and was told this is a “handshake” between Final cut and the AJA card, and to turn off the dropped frames option and not to worry about it. Apparantly, this is a new feature. Who wanted this feature, I do not know, but I am not happy with the answer so far. I would have preferred honesty and for them to say “we dont have many Mac pro users yet, and we really dont know what is going on.” would have been a bit more respectable.
-
I made a mistake in my testing: I actually get good RAID performance as long as the Kona isn’t in the system and the FC card is in *either* slot 3 or slot 4 – which makes more sense than what I originally said.
I’ve called AJA and they are going to do some testing, plus send me a new card.
So, my question is does anyone have the a similar setup – Mac Pro, Kona & Apple FC card – and *not* see this problem? It’d be useful to know if someone with the same config has no problems.
-
How many gigs of ram installed in your Mac pro? My issue seems to be Ram related. (People are saying Apple is still having issues with Mac Pros over 2 gigs of ram with 3rd party cards.)
-
I have 16 GB of RAM.
-
Just for the hell of it, go down to 1 gig, see what happens. (holy @$%#, 16 gigs. I thought 5 was a lot)
-
I will almost guarantee that going down to 2 gigs or less will clear your dropped frame issue. As far as the data rates from you RAID, that I am not sure, but give it a try. It fixed my issue here. According to AJA, that was a known issue, that was fixed, but apparantly not completely.
-
What’s really weird is that just for a test, I put the ATTO card back in, the one that’s supposed to not work well until ATTO releases a new driver and it seems to be working fine! I’m getting the speed I’d expect – 230 MB/s – and I haven’t had a crash yet. Oh, actually: that’s not true. I did get a freeze in FCP when I tried to do a render.
It’s all really weird and, basically, I think the combination of Mac Pro, more than 2 GB RAM and fibre channel is not reliable. I haven’t heard from anyone having no problems.
-
were you able to pull out all the ram and see if that helped? It definitely did here.
-
It made no difference. Wow, this is frustrating!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up