Re: spindown

Daniel Phillips (phillips@bonn-fries.net)
Wed, 20 Jun 2001 20:00:22 +0200


On Wednesday 20 June 2001 19:32, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > BTW, with nominal 100,000 erases you have to write 10 terabytes
> > to your 100 meg flash disk before you'll see it start to
> > degrade.
>
> That assumes you write out full blocks. If you flush after
> every byte written you'll hit the limit a lot sooner ;)

Yep, so if you are running on a Yopy, try not to sync after each byte.

> Btw, this is also a problem with your patch, when you write
> out buffers all the time your disk will spend more time seeking
> all over the place (moving the disk head away from where we are
> currently reading!) and you'll end up writing the same block
> multiple times ...

It doesn't work that way, it tacks the flush onto the trailing edge of a
burst of disk activity, or it flushes out an isolated update, say an edit
save, which would have required the same amount of disk activity, just a few
seconds off in the future. Sometimes it does write a few extra sectors when
disk activity is sporadic, but the impact on total throughput is small enough
to be hard to measure reliably. Even so, there is some optimizing that could
be done - the update could be interleaved a little better with the falling
edge of a heavy traffic episode. This would require that the io rate be
monitored instead of just the queue backlog. I'mi nterested in tackling that
eventually - it has applications in other areas than just the early update.

--
Daniel
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