From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ming Zhang Subject: Re: RAID-5 streaming read performance Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 08:28:57 -0400 Message-ID: <1121430537.5548.9.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <1121390620.5544.134.camel@localhost.localdomain> <871x6095ty.fsf@uwo.ca> Reply-To: mingz@ele.uri.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <871x6095ty.fsf@uwo.ca> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Dan Christensen Cc: Linux RAID List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 22:11 -0400, Dan Christensen wrote: > Ming Zhang writes: > > > On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 19:29 -0400, Mark Hahn wrote: > >> > >> > i also want a way to clear part of the whole page cache by file id. :) > >> > >> understandably, kernel developers are don't high-prioritize this sort of > >> not-useful-for-normal-work feature. > > agree. > > Clearing just part of the page cache sounds too complicated to be > worth it, but clearing it all seems reasonable; some kernel developers > spend time doing benchmarks too! maybe they do not care to run a program to clear it every time. :P > > >> > Dan Christensen wrote: > >> > > >> > > I'm really surprised there isn't something in /proc you can use to > >> > > clear or disable the cache. Would be very useful for benchmarking! > >> > >> I assume you noticed "blockdev --flushbufs", no? it works for me > > I had tried this and noticed that it didn't work for files on a > filesystem. But it does seem to work for block devices. That's > great, thanks. I didn't realize the cache was so complicated; > it can be retained for files but not for the block device underlying > those files! yes, that is the why the command name is blockdev. :) i guess for files we just need to call fsync system call? is that call work on block device as well? > > > a test i did show that even you have sda and sdb to form a raid0, > > the page cache for sda and sdb will not be used by raid0. kind of > > funny. > > I thought I had noticed raid devices making use of cache from > underlying devices, but a test I just did agrees with your result, for > both RAID-1 and RAID-5. Again, this seems odd. Shouldn't the raid > layer take advantage of a block that's already in RAM? I guess this > won't matter in practice, since you usually don't read from both a > raid device and an underlying device. you are right, that is weired in real world. ming