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nmelay
Collaborator

Gaia partition misalignment

During Gaia installation (appliance/open server), partitions are NOT aligned on a 1MB boundary, but are instead cylinder-aligned, in a MS-DOS compatible way.

This alignment turns to a real performance problem with today's RAID, SSDs and AF HDDs.
Filesystem blocks being misaligned with storage blocks leads to read-before-write operations, which can incur a severe performance hit.
My own measurements showed storage performance being more than halved on some specific workload.
(The worst case scenario probably is heavy SmartEvent activity.)

This issue was fixed in WS 2008 and RHEL 6, when the performance hit first became obvious.
Gaia should have inherited the fix from RHEL, but this did not happen due to the use of a custom installer.
The packaged fdisk utility was fixed, the installer was not.

Fixing an installed Check Point system is almost impossible and requires LVM wizardry.

Please fix the installer and make sure partitions are 1MB-aligned at installation time.

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