On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Badari Pulavarty wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 23:58 +0200, Bodo Eggert wrote:
> > Badari Pulavarty <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 22:01 +0200, Guido Fiala wrote:
> >
> > [large files trash cache]
> >
> > > Is there a reason why those applications couldn't use O_DIRECT ?
> >
> > The cache trashing will affect all programs handling large files:
> >
> > mkisofs * > iso
> > dd < /dev/hdx42 | gzip > imagefile
> > perl -pe's/filenamea/filenameb/' < iso | cdrecord - # <- never tried
> >
>
> Are these examples which demonstrate the thrashing problem.
You can alyo cat a big file into /dev/null. I made those examples in order
to demonstrate the problem with using O_DIRECT.
OTOH, I don't realtime stuff on my computer, so I'm not really affected,
but I'll try to show it anyway.
> > Changing a few programs will only partly cover the problems.
> >
> > I guess the solution would be using random cache eviction rather than
> > a FIFO. I never took a look the cache mechanism, so I may very well be
> > wrong here.
>
> Read-only pages should be re-cycled really easily & quickly. I can't
> belive read-only pages are causing you all the trouble.
Just a q&d test:
$ time ls -l $DIR > /dev/null
real 0m0.442s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.024s
$ time ls -l $DIR > /dev/null
real 0m0.077s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.008s
cat $BIGFILES_1.5GB > /Dev/null
$ time ls -l $DIR > /dev/null
real 0m0.270s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.008s
$ time ls -l $DIR > /dev/null
real 0m0.078s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.004s
BTW:
I suggested the random eviction because it will evict pages from large
files more likely than pages from small files, but I now think it will
cause the evicted pages to be non-continuous, too, and thereby cause
rereading them to be slower. I don't know which effect would be worse.
--
Is reading in the bathroom considered Multitasking?
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