Michael Tokarev wrote: > Michael Tokarev wrote: > By the way. I just ran - for fun - a read test of a raid array. > > Reading blocks of size 512kbytes, starting at random places on a 400Gb > array, doing 64threads. > > O_DIRECT: 336.73 MB/sec. > !O_DIRECT: 146.00 MB/sec.
And when turning off read-ahead, the speed dropped to 30 MB/sec. Read-ahead should not help here, I think... But after analyzing the "randomness" a bit, it turned out alot of requests are coming to places "near" the ones which has been read recently. After switching to another random number generator, speed in a case WITH readahead enabled dropped to almost 5Mb/sec ;) And sure thing, withOUT O_DIRECT, the whole system is almost dead under this load - because everything is thrown away from the cache, even caches of /bin /usr/bin etc... ;) (For that, fadvise() seems to help a bit, but not alot). (No, really - this load isn't entirely synthetic. It's a typical database workload - random I/O all over, on a large file. If it can, it combines several I/Os into one, by requesting more than a single block at a time, but overall it is random.) /mjt - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/