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Date:      Tue, 21 Mar 2000 20:04:38 +0100
From:      Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Cc:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: patches for test / review
Message-ID:  <20000321200438.F966@yedi.iaf.nl>
In-Reply-To: <200003211729.JAA81170@apollo.backplane.com>; from dillon@apollo.backplane.com on Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 09:29:56AM -0800
References:  <20000320111544.A14789@fw.wintelcom.net> <20102.953580112@critter.freebsd.dk> <20000321000435.A8143@yedi.iaf.nl> <200003211729.JAA81170@apollo.backplane.com>

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On Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 09:29:56AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :> 
> :> I would think that track-caches and intelligent drives would gain
> :> much if not more of what clustering was designed to do gain.
> :
> :Hm. But I'd think that even with modern drives a smaller number of bigger
> :I/Os is preferable over lots of very small I/Os. Or have I missed the point?

>     As long as you do not blow away the drive's cache with your big I/O's,
>     and as long as you actually use all the returned data, it's definitely 
>     more efficient to issue larger I/O's.

Prefetching data that is never used is obviously a waste. 256K might be a
bit big, I was thinking of something like 64-128Kb 

Drive caches tend to be 0.5-1Mbyte (on SCSI disks) for modern drives. 

I happen to hate write-caching on disk drives so I did not consider that as
a factor.

>     If you generate requests that are too large - say over 1/4 the size of
>     the drive's cache, the drive will not be able to optimize parallel 
>     requests as well.

True.

-- 
Wilko Bulte 			Arnhem, The Netherlands	  
http://www.tcja.nl  		The FreeBSD Project: http://www.freebsd.org


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