From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Apr 20 5:42:55 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from wit379112.student.utwente.nl (wit379119.student.utwente.nl [130.89.232.129]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 79AE537B440 for ; Fri, 20 Apr 2001 05:42:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from niek@wit379112.student.utwente.nl) Received: by wit379112.student.utwente.nl (Postfix, from userid 1000) id AB86D5D3A; Fri, 20 Apr 2001 14:45:43 +0200 (CEST) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 14:45:43 +0200 From: Niek Bergboer To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: UFS block size vs. write speed Message-ID: <20010420144543.F30241@wit379119.student.utwente.nl> Reply-To: niek@bergboer.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, I've got a machine connected to a 100 MBit/FDX network and I would like to store largish (~20 MB or bigger) files on it that are downloaded from the network over a dc card. The only consideration here is speed since the files are all temporary. I'm running FreeBSD 4.3-RC1. The dc card is fine and does 9.2 MB/s. The problem arises when writing to the UFS filesystem, which makes the transfer rate drop down to 5.6 MB/s using the standard 8 kb blocksize. The problem here seems to be the combined network and disk interrupt load since writing to the filesystem from /dev/zero results in 13 MB/s rates. The issue is that -- and I'm not feeding trolls here -- that Linux 2.2 smashed up to 8.5 MB/s through... Reading from the filesystem and uploading to the network puts 8.6 MB/s through, so that's no problem. I tried to increase block-sizes on said filesystem to 64 kb, which increased the throughput to around 7 MB/s. When trying to make blocksizes 128 of 256 kb, newfs segfaults (...). So my questions: a.) Is it possible to create larger blocksizes, and would that increase write speed? b.) Are there other newfs options that I can use to increase throughput? c.) Does FreeBSD support filesystem other than UFS/FFS that allow for faster transfer rates? PS: The tests were already done with the fs mounted async. The drive in question communicates at UDMA/33 on a PIIX4 controller in an AMD K6/2 233 system. Niek Bergboer -- Conscience doth make cowards of us all. -- Shakespeare To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message