I'm seeing very strange performance characteristics on one of my servers. This server is running a simple two-disk software-RAID1 setup with LVM spanning /dev/md0. One of the logical volumes /dev/vg0/secure is encrypted using dmcrypt with LUKS and mounted with the sync and noatimes flag. Writing to that volume is incredibly slow at 1.8 MB/s and the CPU usage stays near 0%. There are 8 crpyto/1-8 processes running (it's a Intel Quadcore CPU). I hope that someone on serverfault has seen this before :-(. uname -a 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64 #1 SMP Tue Mar 8 00:01:30 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux Interestingly, when I read from the device I get good performance numbers: reading without encryption: $ dd if=/dev/vg0/secure of=/dev/null bs=64k count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out 6553600000 bytes (6.6 GB) copied, 68.8951 s, 95.1 MB/s reading with encryption: $ dd if=/dev/mapper/secure of=/dev/null bs=64k count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out 6553600000 bytes (6.6 GB) copied, 69.7116 s, 94.0 MB/s However, when I try to write to the device: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=64k 8809+0 records in 8809+0 records out 577306624 bytes (577 MB) copied, 321.861 s, 1.8 MB/s Also, when I read I see CPU usage, when I write, the CPU stays at almost 0% usage. Here is output of cryptsetup luksDump: LUKS header information for /dev/vg0/secure Version: 1 Cipher name: aes Cipher mode: cbc-essiv:sha256 Hash spec: sha1 Payload offset: 2056 MK bits: 256 MK digest: dd 62 b9 a5 bf 6c ec 23 36 22 92 4c 39 f8 d6 5d c1 3a b7 37 MK salt: cc 2e b3 d9 fb e3 86 a1 bb ab eb 9d 65 df b3 dd d9 6b f4 49 de 8f 85 7d 3b 1c 90 83 5d b2 87 e2 MK iterations: 44500 UUID: a7c9af61-d9f0-4d3f-b422-dddf16250c33 Key Slot 0: ENABLED Iterations: 178282 Salt: 60 24 cb be 5c 51 9f b4 85 64 3d f8 07 22 54 d4 1a 5f 4c bc 4b 82 76 48 d8 a2 d2 6a ee 13 d7 5d Key material offset: 8 AF stripes: 4000 Key Slot 1: DISABLED Key Slot 2: DISABLED Key Slot 3: DISABLED Key Slot 4: DISABLED Key Slot 5: DISABLED Key Slot 6: DISABLED Key Slot 7: DISABLED