Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:

On Sun May 31 2009, Leslie Rhorer wrote:

  

quoted

quoted

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be. Take a well-considered drive such
as the WD RE3; it's spec for average latency is 4.2ms. However does it
include the rotational latency (the time the head takes to reach the
sector once it's on the track)? I bet it doesn't. Taking it to be only
the average seek time, this drive is still among the fastest. For a
7200rpm drive this latency is just 4.2ms, so we'd have for this fast
drive an average total latency of 8.4ms.
      

That's an average.  For a random seek to exceed that, it's going to have to
span many cylinders.  Give the container size of a modern cylinder, that's
a pretty big jump.  Single applications will tend to have their data lumped
somewhat together on the drive.

    

quoted

quoted

with

      

quoted

quoted

No, random I/O is the most common case for busy servers, when there
are lots of processes doing uncorrelated reads and writes. Even if a
      

Yes, exactly.  By definition, such a scenario represents a multithreaded
set of seeks, and as we already established, multithreaded seeks are vastly
more efficient than serial random seeks.  The 400 seeks per second number
for 4 drives applies.  I don't know the details of the Linux schedulers,
but most schedulers employ some variation of an elevator seek to maximize
seek efficiency.  The brings the average latency way down and brings the
seek frequency way up.
    

Ah, I never really understood how adding more random load could increase 
performance. Now I get it :)

  

quoted

quoted

single application does sequential access the head will likely have
moved between them. The only solution is to have lots of ram for
cache, and/or lots of disks. It'd be better if they were connected to
several controllers...
      

A large RAM cache will help, but as I already pointed out, the increases in
returns for increasing cache size diminish rapidly past a certain point.
Most quality drives these days have a 32MB cache, or 128M for a 4 drive
array.  Add the Linux cache on top of that, and it should be sufficient for
most purposes.  Remember, random seeks implies small data extents.  Lots of
disks will bring the biggest benefit, and disks are cheap.  Multiple
controllers really are not necessary, especially if the controller and
drives support NCQ , but having multiple controllers certainly doesn't
hurt.
    

Yet I've heard NCQ makes some things worse. Some raid tweaking pages tell you 
to try disabling NCQ.

I've actually been thinking about trying md-cache with an SSD on top of my new 
raid and see how that works long term. But I can't really think of a good 
benchmark that actually imitates my particular use cases well enough to show 
me if it'd help me at all ::)

I doubt my punny little 30G OCZ Vertex would really help all that much any 
how.
  

For ext[34] you might want to put the journal on SSD, if you are doing 
any significant write that will help.
Mounting data=journal may also help write, supposedly the write will 
complete when the data hits the journal, and not wait for the platter.

-- 
Bill Davidsen [off-list ref]
  Even purely technical things can appear to be magic, if the documentation is
obscure enough. For example, PulseAudio is configured by dancing naked around a
fire at midnight, shaking a rattle with one hand and a LISP manual with the
other, while reciting the GNU manifesto in hexadecimal. The documentation fails
to note that you must circle the fire counter-clockwise in the southern
hemisphere.