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Date:      Mon, 13 Nov 1995 21:49:48 -0800
From:      David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@ref.tfs.com>
Cc:        uhclem%nemesis@fw.ast.com (Frank Durda IV), simonm@dcs.gla.ac.uk, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Disk I/O that binds 
Message-ID:  <199511140549.VAA04329@corbin.Root.COM>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 13 Nov 95 21:34:16 PST." <199511140534.VAA26450@ref.tfs.com> 

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>however, a 5 Second wait would imply reading about 25MB of data!
>(though I guess a process that neads to do 10 reads needs to get past this hog
>10 times before being able to proceed  (it might be getting little bits
>of disk at a time. 

   Only if you have very fast disks...which explains why people like me don't
see the problem very often, and when I do see it, it's not serious enough to
be a "problem". People with slow disks (IDE) will see the problem magnified
significantly.
   For fairness, I think the queue depth for each chunk needs to be limited to
less than 10 requests. It should be tuneable so that we can experiment with
different values. For the moment I can write a patch that will disable the
sorting in disksort - people experiancing the "hang" problem should try the
patch when I make it available and see if the problem goes away. ...Of course
disk performance will suffer unless you're using SCSI with tagged queueing (in
which case the drive does the ordering - usually much more intelligently).

-DG



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