Help!!! How dp you measure PCI bus utilization

EtOH

Senior member
Oct 13, 1999
845
0
0
Hello All, got a question for you.

I have 8 servers, each with 20 PCI slots, in those slots are 13 x Quad Port T1 boards, 1 x SCSI controller, 2 x GB Nics, 2 bus extenders (1 for main bus, 1 for extension bus). The SCSI controller is an Adaptec U320 RAID controller with 5 Seagate 15,000 RPM U320 drives. Each system is Quad Xeons w/ 4 GB memory (I think they are 2.8 GHz).

These systems are crashing with RAID errors farily regularly. I was wondering if anyone know how to measure PCI bus utilization in real time. My theory is the bus is saturated and data is bursting to the RAID controller in large datachunks and killing it.

I believe the RAID controller has 256mb on board. Using Seagate 15,000 RPM U320 drives.

Any help greatly appreciated.

EtOH
 

sao123

Lifer
May 27, 2002
12,653
205
106
How many times a day do we go through this.... :|


Plz read and follow the guidelines for this forum.

Questions regarding troubleshooting, technical support, and product advice belong in other appropriate forums such as General Hardware, Networking, Video, etc. They have more traffic and, they are visited by knowledgable, enthusiastic members eager to share good advice and help troubleshoot problems.

off-topic posts are likely to be moved or locked.

and

(but don't rely on it to do your homework)

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PS I dont think your theory holds water...
Your RAID will way out perform your PCI bus, if the bus was truly saturated, then the RAID would be starving for data.

Did you check for errors in the RAID bios event log?
Lets even assume your running windows server.... did you research the errors in the windows event log???
Did you even know that event logs even exist?
 

KalTorak

Member
Jun 5, 2001
55
0
0
Aw, be fair. Troubleshooting or not, any question whose answer is "Hook up a logic analyzer" belongs here. :)
(I don't think that theory works, either; no way should a PCI device get horked because the bus is full.)
 

Pudgygiant

Senior member
May 13, 2003
784
0
0
The thing that annoys me... is you didn't run ANY tests, and you just assumed it belongs in here. There's plenty of stuff you can run to narrow down the problem. After you do, if you don't find the problem you can post in GH.