Re: 1352 NUL bytes at the end of a page?

Steven Cole
2004-05-19T13:59:34Z

On May 19, 2004, at 7:36 AM, Chris Mason wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 09:28, Steven Cole wrote:
>
>>> Steven, with all else being equal, you said you found a 2.6.3 SuSE
>>> kernel to significantly outperform 2.6.6, is that right? If so can
>>> you try the same test with plain 2.6.3 please? We'll go from there.
>>
>> Actually, it was a Mandrake kernel, 2.6.3-4mdk IIRC. Whatever is
>> the default with MDK 10. One salient difference with the vendor
>> kernel is that everything which can be a module is, and I wasn't
>> using any modules with my kernels. BTW, I was careful to have the
>> same hdparm settings during the performance testing.
>>
>> The performance difference was very repeatable. Using the script
>> provided by Andy Isaacson, the 2.6.3-4mdk did the clone in about
>> 11 minutes total, while the various current kernels took about
>> 15 minutes total. The user times were the same, and the difference
>> was in system time. Those numbers are from memory, the actual
>> results should be in the archive.
>
> Was this regression only reiserv3 or both v3 and ext3?
>
> -chris
>

I went back through the archive to make sure, and since I didn't
specify where I did the timed tests, those timing tests would have
been done on my /home partition, which is reiserfs v3.

Since I was using different partitions for ext3 and reiserfs on
/dev/hda, a direct comparison between ext3 and reiserfs wouldn't
be completely fair, but a "watching the paint dry" observation
seemed to indicate that reiserfs was significantly faster for this
load. I did press my backup disk into service for this testing,
to eliminate the possibility that this was due to a finicky disk,
and I have a 3.9 G partition which I've formatted first reiserfs,
then ext3, so I could do some fair tests between reiserfs and
ext3 on that disk. But I think the results are already known;
reiserfs opens a can of whoopass for this kind of load.

Steven