On Apr 3 00:35, Martin Wege via Cygwin wrote: > On Tue, Apr 2, 2024 at 3:17 PM Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin > <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote: > > > > On Apr 2 02:04, Martin Wege via Cygwin wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > > > Is there any document which describes how Cygwin and Win32 file > > > prefetch and readahead work, and which sizes are used (e.g. always > > > read one full page even if only 16 bytes are requested?)? > > > > I'm not aware of any docs, but again, keep in mind that Cygwin is a > > usersapce DLL. We basically do what Windows does for low-level file > > access. > > > > > Quick /usr/bin/stat /etc/profile returns "IO Block: 65536". Does that > > > mean the file's block size is really 64k? Is this info per filesystem, > > > or hardcoded in Cygwin? > > > > Hardcoded in Cygwin since 2017, based on a discussion in terms of > > file access performance, especially when using stdio.h functions: > > > > https://cygwin.com/cgit/newlib-cygwin/commit/?id=7bef7db5ccd9c > > OUCH. > > While I can understand the motivation, FAT32 on multi-GB-devices > having 64k block size, and Win32 API on Win95/98/ME/Win7 being > optimized to that insane block size, it is absolutely WRONG with > today's NTFS and even more so with ReFS. This only works if you stream > files, but as soon as you are doing random read/writes the performance > is terrible due to cache thrashing. That could explain the many > complaints about Cygwin's IO performance.
The above patch *only* sets stat::st_blksize to 64K. Nothing else happens! This usually means that stdio.h functions use this size for their buffer and readahead. It doesn't affect direct calls to read(2)/write(2) and fread(3)/fwrite(3) at all! > So, what can be done? I'm not a benchmarking guru, so I'd like to > propose to add a tunable called EXPERIMENTAL_PREFERRED_IO_BLKSIZE to No. We have two ways to handle this *iff* there's really a reason to handle this. - Either we just lower PREFERRED_IO_BLKSIZE to 4K or 8K, but that's kind of bad in terms of pipes, the clipboard, etc. - So we keep PREFERRED_IO_BLKSIZE at 64K but don't use it for disk files. Rather, we read this info from the filesystem: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ddi/ntddk/ns-ntddk-_file_fs_sector_size_information If the filesystem is local and SSINFO_FLAGS_NO_SEEK_PENALTY is set, we could stick to 64K. Otherwise the PhysicalBytesPerSectorForPerformance member might be helpful I guess. Needs checking, of course. If this isn't any good, we can still fallback to FILE_FS_FULL_SIZE_INFORMATION as in fhandler_base::fstatvfs_by_handle, https://cygwin.com/cgit/newlib-cygwin/tree/winsup/cygwin/fhandler/disk_file.cc#n661 Corinna -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple