Hi,
I made a couple of discoveries today which were surprising to me:
1. Disk hardware caching defaults to ON. (hdparm -W1 /dev/hda)
2. It makes a *big* difference in write performance.
I had always thought that the default was off. I also always assumed
that a small cache behind a large (OS) cache would make no difference.
Here are my results with bonnie under kernel 2.4.14 on a reiserfs with a
maxtor Diamond max+ 60GB udma100 drive:
Write caching on:
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU
/sec %CPU
256 12618 97.1 38027 36.3 9647 6.9 11250 73.6 31832
12.1 200.9 1.2
Write caching off:
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU
/sec %CPU
256 9917 76.3 12280 11.2 5159 3.5 9934 65.3 33056
14.1 203.9 1.4
Note that block writes are over 3 times faster with caching on.
So what are the implications here for journalling? Do I have to turn
off caching and suffer a huge performance hit?
-Steve Bergman
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 30 2001 - 21:00:17 EST