Nix wrote:
On 18 Jan 2007, Bill Davidsen spake thusly:
) Steve Cousins wrote:
time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mount-point/test.dat bs=1024k count=1024
That doesn't give valid (repeatable) results due to caching issues. Go
back to the thread I started on RAID-5 write, and see my results. More
important, the way I got rid of the cache effects (beside an unloaded
systems) was:
 sync; time bash -c "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k count=2048 of=/mnt/point/file; 
sync"
I empty the cache, then time the dd including the sync at the
end. Results are far more repeatable.

Recent versions of dd have `oflag=direct' as well, to open the output
with O_DIRECT. (I'm not sure what the state of O_DIRECT on regular files
is though.)

Doing the write using page cache and then just a single sync at the end gives a closer estimate of what can be written to the array in general. By going to O_DIRECT every i/o take place unbuffered, which is more typical of database use or similar. My original problem was capturing real data at 75MB/s and not being able to write it to an array that fast, taking advantage of page cache. By going to huge stripe cache, about 20x larger than default, performance was boosted to a more useful level.

I think both measurements are useful, but they aren't measuring the same thing.

--
bill davidsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 CTO TMR Associates, Inc
 Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Reply via email to