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Date:      Tue, 26 Jun 2001 10:21:56 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au>
To:        Flemming Froekjaer <flemming@froekjaer.org>
Cc:        hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Disk performance
Message-ID:  <20010626102156.G95583@gsmx07.alcatel.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <3B37C156.CD4CE20C@froekjaer.org>; from flemming@froekjaer.org on Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 03:55:18PM -0700
References:  <3B37C156.CD4CE20C@froekjaer.org>

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On 2001-Jun-25 15:55:18 -0700, Flemming Froekjaer <flemming@froekjaer.org> wrote:
>I tried to dump a file system to a DLT tape.
>The tape is cable of 10MB/s but I only got about 1600 KB/s
>To find out if it was the tape I tried to dump to /dev/null instead, but
>i still only get 1665 KB/s

Some time ago (mid-November 1998), I looked into dump (check out the
thread `dump(8) very slow' in freebsd-hackers).  The major problem
with dump is that it reads the disk in filesystem-block (typically 8K)
sized blocks (or less for frags) and doesn't attempt to merge adjacent
reads.  It also dumps files in inode order - accessing the disk in
same order as the output blocks, rather than trying to sort the disk
reads.

At the time, I instrumented dump to get a record of physical disk
accesses whilst dumping a couple of filesystems and did some
experiments with re-ordering the reads, but never posted my results (I
don't remember what the results were, but I didn't get a massive
speed-up).

Apparently, NetBSD's dump(8) has improved the buffering to get much
better throughput.  You might like to have a look - I haven't gotten
around to it yet.

Peter

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