Kam Leo wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm trying to find the best location for a repository to do FC8
installs. My first two trials were direct from DVD and NFS mounted. The
NFS mount showed that the max data rate to the new machine was only
about 12MB/s, so transfer rate isn't an issue, it's Gbit connection.
Therefore, I suspect that seek time may be an issue, I'm wondering if
people have compared putting the repository on a USB stick instead of
network.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
Drive seek times are in the range of 8 - 20 ms. Your NFS server's hard
drive has 8 - 32 MB of cache. The server's I/O driver provides
additional caching/buffering. Data is being accessed sequentially,
i.e. beginning of file to end of file. Unless the server has a heavy
I/O workload the disk access/seek times should be completely masked by
the buffering.
I don't see how you get that, for many small RPMs the transfer time
would be no larger than the disk seek time, even if only 100Mbit or so
is actually used.
How is the server drive's seek time a limiting factor when your target
system also has to store that same data on its own drive?
Flash drive install will be faster because you eliminate the
networking protocol overhead.
That was the unresolved issue. Gbit networking is faster than the USB
bus, but I never saw any indication that the transfer rates over the
network were taking advantage of that, they barely would reach the limit
of 100Mbit. That's why I was wondering if the faster seek on a flash
would be more important than the slower transfer rate.
Note: I was really surprised at how many packages are small, on the DVD
25% are <50k.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
