Boot poster challenge

Willem Riede wrrhdev at riede.org
Sun Nov 21 20:28:23 UTC 2004


On 11/21/2004 10:55:47 AM, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 10:42:45AM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 20, 2004 at 11:50:49PM +0100, Ziga Mahkovec wrote:
> > > This chart includes data from iostat (sysstat package).  Notice how the
> > > disk is fully utilized (%util) during readahead, but the throughput
> > > (rkB/s) is *really* low.  This could very well be a problem with my hard
> > > disk.  hdparm seems fine though (and I checked the parameters before
> > > running readahead).
> >
> > Disks are very very seek constrained. You get wonderful performance
> > reading linear data. The moment you read a lot of scattered files or a
> > file with a lot of segments you will get low performance - even more so
> > on laptops than desktops
> 
> yeah we saw that; sorting the list on disk sector shaved 2 seconds off...
> if we want to save more we'll have to fix the on disk layout to be less
> spread out. That's not going to be fun...

Is there any way to have a "pre-cooked" swap image of all the files you need  
so that when you boot you can swap it all in in one big contiguous read  
instead of having to read file by file?

Regards, Willem Riede.







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