Physical tape drives are a precious resource in today’s fast growing data centers. If you’re running backups or copies to physical tape drives performance is key. I did some research on this topic based on a customer request. They reported that backups on Windows clients where much faster compared to Linux clients when writing directly to tape (via locally Media Agent).
When checking the device configuration in Data Protector I’ve noticed that drive where using the default segment size for LTO drives (2000). After changing the segment size from 2000 to 20000 (my own default) the performance issue was gone!
The default value 2000 is for LTO1 drives and there is a close relationship between cartridge capacity and the size/number of segments that are created during a write operation. If you’re using modern drives such as LTO5, LTO6 or even LTO7 you can store multiple times the data that fits on a LTO1 cartridge (6000 GB vs. 100 GB native).
While the performance issue was resolved it was still not clear why a Windows client does not show the same reduced performance with a segment size of 2000.
It turned out that st driver in the Linux Kernel usually needs to flush its buffer when a file mark is written. It was obvious that there is a relation so I started looking into MTWEOFI. MTWEOFI allows the st driver to preserve the content of its buffer, enabling the next file operation to start immediately.
Starting with Data Protector A.09.05 the MTWEOFI functionality can be abled in the omnirc of the Linux Media Agent host. It is mandatory that the used Linux Kernel understands MTWEOFI. This is the case for RHEL 6.5 and later as well as for SLES11 and later (have not checked SLES10).
# Enable MTWEOFI support on Linux Media Agent / Performance
OB2FORCESCSI=WFM
OB2IMMEDFM=1
Performance tests
The following performance numbers have been collected during my tests to demonstrate the relationship of segment size and write throughput on Linux using Data Protector A.09.07. I’ve been using a single 16 GB file that was backed up directly to a LTO4 drive. The drive was configured with a 256k block size (default) and 32 agent buffers.
- Without MTWEOFI the drive would stop after every 2GB of data written resulting in a poor overall performance.
- A larger segment size (20000 over 2000) will cause the drive to stop less frequently resulting in a better performance.
- With MTWEOFI support the drive would not stop at all, even if a file mark needs to be written.

108,84 MB/s – default omnirc, segment size 2000 (default)
183,91 MB/s – default omnirc, segment size 20000
188,24 MB/s – modified omnirc, segment size 2000 (default)
190,48 MB/s – modified omnirc, segment size 20000
Test environment: Internal HP LTO4 SAS drive (Firmware U64D) attached to HP Smart Array P410 (Firmware 6.64) in HP ProLiant ML350 G6 running CentOS release 6.8, 2.6.32-642.1.1.el6.x86_64.
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