On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 04:17:58PM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Wu Fengguang wrote:
> >----- Forwarded message from Iozone <[email protected]> -----
> >
> >Subject: Adaptive read-ahead V12
> >From: Iozone <[email protected]>
> >To: Wu Fengguang <[email protected]>
> >X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2670
> >Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 11:44:37 -0500
> >
> >Wu Fengguang,
> >
> > I see that Andrew M. is giving you some pushback....
> > His argument is that the application could do a better job
> > of scheduling its own read-ahead. ( I've heard this one
> > before)
> >
> > My thoughts on this argument would be along the
> > lines of:
> >
> > Indeed the application might be able to do a better
> > job, however expecting, or demanding, the rewrite
> > of all applications to behave better might be an unreasonable
> > expectation.
>
> A reasonable expectation would be that the application would have a way
> to tell the kernel to ignore readahead for a given file, other than
> changing the behavior of the kernel as a whole for all processes on the
> machine. This smart application could then use aio or some other similar
> method to do preread itself.
Sure. The adaptive readahead works fine with user level readahead via
the readahead() or posix_fadvise() syscall. I.e. if a program do
necessary readahead() calls that can cover all the file pages
requested by the following read() calls, it avoids triggering
unnecessary kernel readaheads.
> My personal opinion is that the kernel only does a good job reading
> ahead for sequential access, and since that's the common case only a
> means of preventing that effort need be provided.
posix_fadvise(fd, ..., POSIX_FADV_RANDOM) can do the trick for a file.
blockdev --setra 0 /dev/hda does so for a device.
Wu
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