Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Greg Trounson
2007-08-09T01:14:01Z

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>
>>>> People just need to know about the performance differences - very
>>>> few realise its more than a fraction of a percent. I'm sure Gentoo
>>>> will use relatime the moment anyone knows its > 5% 8)
>>> noatime,nodiratime gave 50% of wall-clock kernel rpm build
>>> performance improvement for Dave Jones, on a beefy box. Unless i
>>> misunderstood what you meant under 'fraction of a percent' your
>>> numbers are _WAY_ off.
>> What numbers - I didn't quote any performance numbers ?
>
> ok, i misunderstood your "very few realise its more than a fraction of a
> percent" sentence, i thought you were saying it's a fraction of a
> percent.
>
> Measurements show that noatime helps 20-30% on regular desktop
> workloads, easily 50% for kernel builds and much more than that (in
> excess of 100%) for file-read-intense workloads. We cannot just walk
> past such a _huge_ performance impact so easily without even reacting to
> the performance arguments, and i'm happy Ubuntu picked up
> noatime,nodiratime and is whipping up the floor with Fedora on the
> desktop.
>

Sorry I'm just not seeing those gains here. With my filesystems mounted with atime
defaults the Quake sources build in 1m28.856s. A test with ls -ltu verifies that atime is
working as expected. When I remount my filesystems with:
mount [fs] -o remount,noatime,nodiratime
I get a compile time of 1m23.368s, a mere 6% improvement.

This is on a dual-core Athlon 4200+ box running 2.6.21, so I would have thought this to be
close to a best-case file I/O test.

Greg