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Date:      Tue, 05 Mar 2002 15:03:00 -0800
From:      Lars Eggert <larse@ISI.EDU>
To:        Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
Cc:        "Rogier R. Mulhuijzen" <drwilco@drwilco.net>, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: A weird disk behaviour
Message-ID:  <3C854EA4.5040306@isi.edu>
References:  <Pine.SOL.4.21.0203051659350.12061-100000@onyx>

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I agree that it's probably caching at some level. You're only writing 
about 120MB of data (and half that in your second case). Bump these to a 
couple of GB and see what happens.

Also, could you post your actual measurements?

Lars


Zhihui Zhang wrote:
> The machine has 128M memory. I am doing physical I/O one block at a time,
> so there should be no memory copy.
> 
> -Zhihui
> 
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Rogier R. Mulhuijzen wrote:
> 
> 
>>At 16:03 5-3-2002 -0500, Zhihui Zhang wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Julian Elischer wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>more writes fit in the disk's write cache?
>>>>
>>>For (1), it writes 15000 * 8192 bytes in all.  For (2), it writes 15000 *
>>>4096 bytes in all (assuming the random number distributes evenly between 0
>>>and 8192).  So your suggestion does not make sense to me.
>>>
>>How large is your buffercache?  it might be that the 15000 * ~4096 roughly 
>>matches with your cache, and 15000 * 8912 doesn't.
>>
>>Case (1) would require a lot more physical IO in that case than case (2) 
>>would require.
>>
>>         Doc
>>
>>
>>
>>>-Zhihui
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Zhihui Zhang wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I am doing some raw I/O test on a seagate SCSI disk running FreeBSD 4.5.
>>>>>This situation is like this:
>>>>>
>>>>> +-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---+------
>>>>> |     |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |   | ....
>>>>> +-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---+------
>>>>>
>>>>>Each block is of fixed size, say 8192 bytes. Now I have a user program
>>>>>writing each contiguously laid out block sequentially using /dev/daxxx
>>>>>interface. There are a lot of them, say 15000.  I write the blocks in two
>>>>>ways (the data used in writing are garbage):
>>>>>
>>>>>(1) Write each block fully and sequentially, ie. 8192 bytes.
>>>>>
>>>>>(2) I still write these blocks sequentially, but for each block I only
>>>>>write part of it.  Exactly how many bytes are written inside each 
>>>>>
>>>block is
>>>
>>>>>determinted by a random number between 512 .. 8192 bytes (rounded up a
>>>>>to multiple of 512 bytes).
>>>>>
>>>>>I find out the the performance of (2) is several times better than the
>>>>>performance of (1). Can anyone explain to me why this is the case?
>>>>>
>>>>>Thanks for any suggestions or hints.
>>>>>
>>>>>-Zhihui
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
>>>>>with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
>>>with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
>>>
>>
> 
> 
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
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> 



-- 
Lars Eggert <larse@isi.edu>               Information Sciences Institute
http://www.isi.edu/larse/              University of Southern California

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