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Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:53:04 -0800
From: Aaron Glenn <aaron.glenn@gmail.com>
To: "lukem.freebsd@cse.unsw.edu.au" <lukem.freebsd@cse.unsw.edu.au>
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cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: I've ran out of ideas
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On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:11:59 +1100 (EST),
lukem.freebsd@cse.unsw.edu.au <lukem.freebsd@cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> The simple answer is that both iostat and dd are giving you the correct
> results. Try your dd again with a smaller block size (like the 512 byte
> default) and you should see that disk throughput is closer to what you are
> seeing for your web server.

The /www partition it's reading from was made with -b 65536 and -f 8192.

> I would theorise that your web server is probably only issuing fairly
> small disk reads, so your network performance is being bound by the disk.

That was my first hunch; hence creating a separate partition with
obscene blocksizes (-:

> To test this theory, you could:
> 
> * create an mfs partition and serve off it to see what kind of performance
>    you can get
> * see if you can tweak the web server to use larger reads and writes.
> 
> In your original message you said that increasing the disk block size
> improved performance, which would also indicate that you are being limited
> by disk performance.

I doubt increasing it even more would help. Law of diminishing returns
and all that; then again I'm no expert. Thoughts?

Regards,
aaron.glenn