Re: ext2 performance in 2.5.25 versus 2.4.19pre8aa2

[Daniel Phillips]

On Monday 15 July 2002 07:30, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Lincoln Dale wrote:
> > 
> > Andrew Morton wanted me to do some benchmarking of large files on ext2
> > filesystems rather than the usual block-device testing
> > i've had some time to do this, here are the results.
> > 
> > one-line summary is that some results are better, some are worse; CPU
> > usage is better in 2.5.25, but thoughput is sometimes worse.
> 
> Well thanks for doing this.  All rather strange though.

One result that seems pretty consistent in these tests is that avoiding the 
page cache is good for about 20% overall throughput improvement.  Which is 
significant, but less than I would have thought if bus bandwidth is the only 
major bottleneck.  Something in the vfs/filesystem/blockio path is still 
eating too much cpu.

Another observation: though only one of the tests hit 100% CPU, total 
throughput is still shows consistent improvement as a result of reducing CPU. 
This should not be, it means there is excessive latency between submission of 
requests, that is, the IO pipes are not being kept full.

-- 
Daniel