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Date:      Tue, 5 Mar 2002 16:03:15 -0500 (EST)
From:      Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: A weird disk behaviour
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.4.21.0203051601250.10862-100000@onyx>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0203051255050.26829-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>

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On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Julian Elischer wrote:

> 
> more writes fit in the disk's write cache?

For (1), it writes 15000 * 8192 bytes in all.  For (2), it writes 15000 *
4096 bytes in all (assuming the random number distributes evenly between 0
and 8192).  So your suggestion does not make sense to me.

-Zhihui

> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Zhihui Zhang wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I am doing some raw I/O test on a seagate SCSI disk running FreeBSD 4.5.
> > This situation is like this:
> > 
> >  +-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---+------
> >  |     |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |   | ....
> >  +-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---+------
> > 
> > Each block is of fixed size, say 8192 bytes. Now I have a user program
> > writing each contiguously laid out block sequentially using /dev/daxxx
> > interface. There are a lot of them, say 15000.  I write the blocks in two
> > ways (the data used in writing are garbage):
> > 
> > (1) Write each block fully and sequentially, ie. 8192 bytes.
> > 
> > (2) I still write these blocks sequentially, but for each block I only
> > write part of it.  Exactly how many bytes are written inside each block is
> > determinted by a random number between 512 .. 8192 bytes (rounded up a
> > to multiple of 512 bytes).
> > 
> > I find out the the performance of (2) is several times better than the
> > performance of (1). Can anyone explain to me why this is the case?
> > 
> > Thanks for any suggestions or hints.
> > 
> > -Zhihui
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
> > 
> 
> 


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