RE: async I/O seems to be blocking on 2.6.15

From: Brent Baccala
Date: Mon Nov 06 2006 - 19:04:26 EST


On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Chen, Kenneth W wrote:

I've tried that myself too and see similar result. One thing to note is
that I/O being submitted are pretty big at 1MB, so the vector list inside
bio is going to be pretty long and it will take a while to construct that.
Drop the size for each I/O to something like 4KB will significantly reduce
the time. I haven't done the measurement whether the time to submit I/O
grows linearly with respect to I/O size. Most likely it will. If it is
not, then we might have a scaling problem (though I don't believe we have
this problem).

- Ken



I'm basically an end user here (as far as the kernel is concerned), so
let me ask the basic "dumb user" question here:

How should I do my async I/O if I just want to read or write
sequentially through a file, using O_DIRECT, and letting the CPU get
some work done in the meantime? What about more random access?

I've already concluded that I should try to keep my read and write
files on seperate disks and hopefully on seperate controllers, but I
still seem to be fighting this thing to keep it from blocking.


-bwb

Brent Baccala
cosine@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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