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Date:      Wed, 14 Mar 2001 19:44:49 -0600 (CST)
From:      David Scheidt <dscheidt@tumbolia.com>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Disk I/O problem in 4.3-BETA
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103141941300.38966-100000@shell-2.enteract.com>
In-Reply-To: <20010314154323.O29888@fw.wintelcom.net>

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On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Alfred Perlstein wrote:

:* Iain Templeton <iain@research.canon.com.au> [010314 14:54] wrote:
:> On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
:It's a common starvation problem.
:
:Imagine an elevator that always goes to the nearest requested floor
:instead of making almost complete up then down sweeps.
:
:At quit time there's a good chance you'll never hit the lobby
:because the elevator keeps going to the nearest floor which is
:unlikely to be the lobby once it gets high up enough.
:
:Matt explained that Linux had this "feature" to reduce disk seeking
:for a short period, finally someone with algorithm experience stood
:up and smacked enough people around such that it got changed to
:the proper elevator algorithm.

HP introduced this problem (I think it was somewhat subtler than the way
you've laid it out, though) into HP/UX 10.20 at some point.  It meant that
ls would take minutes(!!) to produce output on one of the boxes I ran, if
it was being pounded on in a certain way.  It's been fixed for a long time,
though.

Daivd

-- 
dscheidt@tumbolia.com
Bipedalism is only a fad.


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