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Date:      Wed, 2 Jan 2002 10:40:30 -0600
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy@karlsbakk.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: increasing readahead?
Message-ID:  <20020102164030.GD21878@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.30.0201011733260.7743-100000@mustard.heime.net>
References:  <20011219200649.GA30574@dan.emsphone.com> <Pine.LNX.4.30.0201011733260.7743-100000@mustard.heime.net>

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In the last episode (Jan 01), Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk said:
> On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > In the last episode (Dec 19), Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk said:
> > > I really need a LARGE readahead for my application. Does anyone
> > > know how I can increase the current one?
> >
> > man setvbuf
> >
> > > I also need a way to pre-allocate chunks of 4 megs when I'm
> > > writing to a file, to make the actual fragments large enough to
> > > eliminate a large part of the actual overhead of seeking
> >
> > Are you sure this is your problem?  FreeBSD does write clustering
> > and allocates disk space to avoid fragmentation.
> 
> Do you know how large these clusters are? Are there any way of
> monitoring / controlling these?

From the code in /sys/kern/vfs_cluster.c , it looks like the kernel
will buffer writes to sequential disk blocks until a non-sequential
write request is received, then asynchronously write the bufferred
blocks.  I just did a quick test dd'ing /dev/zero to a file, and got
the same throughput with 64k as 1m, so it looks like it works.  Do you
have a specific performance problem you're trying to fix here?  What
are your current throuput numbers, and what do you expect them to be?

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com

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