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Date:      Wed, 11 Aug 1999 08:48:38 +0200
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
To:        Michael Vernick <vernick@bell-labs.com>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Help with understand file system performance 
Message-ID:  <32009.934354118@critter.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Aug 1999 15:32:13 EDT." <37B07E3D.16F2B334@bell-labs.com> 

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In message <37B07E3D.16F2B334@bell-labs.com>, Michael Vernick writes:

>My results show that:
>
>1. Performance degrades significantly (15-20%) when going from 1 to 2
>processes then slowly increases as more processes are run.  The same
>performance is achieved when running a single reader vs. running 8
>readers.  This happens for each type of directory structure.

That is a good sign:  It means that you don't have to do unnatural
things to your application to get full throughput out of our
file system.

>2. Performance degrades about 15% for the 1 process experiment when the
>files are split across 2 file systems vs. a single file system.  This
>one has me somewhat perplexed.  Is it because there is more directory
>information thrashing from disk to memory?

That sounds weird...

Do you have twice as many directories this way ?

Or are the two filesystems on the same physical disk ?  if so you
are seeking much more.

>3. On a per process basis, performance increases when the number of
>files per directory increases/number of subdirs decreases.  Is this
>because there is a better chance the directory information about the
>file could be in memory?

Yes.  The minimum directory size is the fragsize of the filesystem,
filling the directories better means better performance.

>Our goal, of course, it to maximize performance.  So any help in the
>tuning of our system (i.e. reading lots of ~15KB files) would be
>appreciated

Try fiddling the newfs parameters.  I see 17% speedup using:

	newfs -b 16384 -f 4096 -c 100

Try to fill your directories so they are just below the fragment
size of the filesystem (Ie: <1024 bytes for no newfs options,
< 4096 bytes with the above options).

--
Poul-Henning Kamp             FreeBSD coreteam member
phk@FreeBSD.ORG               "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."
FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far!


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