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Date:      Sat, 1 Jan 2000 16:01:59 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@nwlink.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: some performance issues
Message-ID:  <20000101160159.O1528@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <386D8ABD.C2894A91@nwlink.com>
References:  <386C0676.F39EC477@3-cities.com> <386C2354.ABD1ED54@nwlink.com> <386C3173.1D695393@3-cities.com> <386C543D.6E59C9DF@nwlink.com> <19991231104441.C2609@emu.sourcee.com> <386CE8AB.29A140B5@nwlink.com> <386CF9DC.B71A9887@3-cities.com> <386D3D3C.C92D02A3@nwlink.com> <386D5C88.B8257D45@3-cities.com> <386D8ABD.C2894A91@nwlink.com>

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On Friday, 31 December 1999 at 21:03:57 -0800, R Joseph Wright wrote:
>
>>> I recompiled my kernel and changed the flags from 0x80ff80ff to
>>> 0xa0ffa0ff.  What is a good program to use to see if I can really tell a
>>> difference?  I tried out some of my bigger programs like star office and
>>> gimp.  Star Office still took a little while to load, gimp seemed to fly
>>> (when it wasn't crashing).
>>
>> I use "iozone -s 160m" because I have 128MB of memory. The size of the
>> file needs to be larger than memory so you aren't benchmarking the
>> cache. You can find it in the packages/benchmark area of the CDROM.

iozone is not really a storage device testing program.  Use rawio (in
the Ports Collection) for that: it bypasses the cache.  Read carefully
the warnings which tell you that you should not use the write tests on
a file system which contains data you want to keep.

> Kent, I tried that, only for me it worked doing "iozone 160".  Here is
> my results:
>
> 11483869 bytes/second for reading
> 15155142 bytes/second for writing

This is sequential access.  You'll never get that in practice.

> Is that really slow?  It's nowhere near 33MB/second.

33 MB/s is the transfer rate from disk buffer to CPU.  The transfer
rate off the platter is slower, and your speeds there look pretty
good.  But remember that they're the ideal case.

> I have a Maxtor 7000rpm with UDMA66 capabilities, although I'll have
> to wait for -STABLE to support that, and a new motherboard as well.
> I may recompile with the old flags just to see the difference.

I'd be interested to see the difference, but I don't think it'll be
very much.  Try both with rawio, and look at the random access
results, which are the only ones that count in practice.

Greg
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