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Date:      Wed, 22 Jan 2003 20:01:35 -0800
From:      "Dax Eckenberg" <deckenberg@dweebsoft.com>
To:        "Noah Garrett Wallach" <sleek@enabled.com>, "Dan Nelson" <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
Cc:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, "canton" <canton@enabled.com>
Subject:   Re: iostat - define Kilobits per transfer
Message-ID:  <0a8401c2c294$22e6e1e0$0a0aa8c0@dweebsoft.com>
References:  <20030122191542.J76039@typhoon.enabled.com> <20030123032816.GA1799@dan.emsphone.com> <20030122193922.C76039@typhoon.enabled.com>

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> > > I currently have an IDE drive that has the capacity to do 128KB/t and
> > > a SCSI drive 64KB/t.  Are these stats in fact showing me that there
> > > is a limitation with the SCSI drive?  Are my file transfering
> > > capaibilities less with the SCSI drive?  I suppose what do I need to
> > > look for in the spcifications when choosing new drives so this does
> > > not happen again?
> >
> > FreeBSD's SCSI layer has a cap of 64k per transaction (apparently
> > because ancient ISA adapters could not do more than 64k), and the ATA
> > layer has a cap of 128k.  You won't see a difference using regular
> > disks.  A 20MB/sec transfer rate comes out to ~300 64K
> > transactions/sec, which most systems should be able to handle with no
> > problems.
> 
> 
> so what exactly does KB per transaction mean? what happens if I am
> handling 300 concurrent users with 160Kbit encoded audio streams - could I
> in fact do this on this machine?  or will I be limited by the 64KB/t
> issue?
> 

300 x 160Kbit = approx. 46Mbit/sec.  
A new-ish SCSI drive should be able to easily pump out in excess of 200 Mbit/sec.
Your bottleneck will be your ethernet adapter long before your local storage.
Unless your app is designed very poorly.

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