Posts Tagged ‘performance’
Increasing Ext3 I/O Performance
In today’s computers, CPU throughput and amount of memory are no longer the bottleneck in performance. Ask any server administrator and they will tell you that one of the biggest concerns with responsiveness of server-side applications is the throughput to and from disk. If you’re using the ext3 filesystem, it turns out there’s a tip that you can use to gain up to a 40% performance boost.
With the default mount options in most distributions, the filesystem will log the last access time to a file. Hackosis recently wrote a quick tutorial on how to disable the access logging in the /etc/fstab file. A little research shows reveals a conversation in 2007 between kernel developers such as Linus Torvalds and Ingo Molnar in which Ingo states his experience with changing the setting:
yeah, it’s really ugly. But otherwise i’ve got no real complaint about
ext3 - with the obligatory qualification that “noatime,nodiratime” in
/etc/fstab is a must. This speeds up things very visibly - especially
when lots of files are accessed. It’s kind of weird that every Linux
desktop and server is hurt by a noticeable IO performance slowdown due
to the constant atime updates, while there’s just two real users of it:
tmpwatch [which can be configured to use ctime so it's not a big issue]
and some backup tools. (Ok, and mail-notify too i guess.) Out of tens of
thousands of applications. So for most file workloads we give Windows a
20%-30% performance edge, for almost nothing. (for RAM-starved kernel
builds the performance difference between atime and noatime+nodiratime
setups is more on the order of 40%)
Using the Hackosis’ tip on disabling the access logging could help boost performance on any systems you have using ext3. Of course, I’d recommend trying it out in a test system before deploying it in a production system, especially since changing the options means you have to re-mount your filesystems. I usually use ReiserFS, but if you are using something like Red Hat or CentOS, the kernel builds don’t support the xfs, jfs, or reiser filesystems unless you compile the options in yourself. Granted, you have to have a “RAM-starved” system first as Ingo states, but if you are experiencing performance issues on a server, there’s a good chance it’s a RAM-starved system or low I/O throughput.
Tags: linux, performance
Filed under How-Tos :
Comments (0) :
Nov 4th, 2008
Western Digital to Release 20,000RPM Hard Drive
With solid state disks on the horizon, Western Digital has been rumored to release a 20,000RPM hard drive. The news came from bet-tech.net that Western Digital is making the drive as a response to pressure to start converting to solid state disks. Currently, the biggest bottleneck in computer systems seems to be I/O speed. We have processors with 4 cores, we tote notebooks with 4GB of memory, we have 80GB iPods for storing music and yet we’re still running on the same speed disks as years ago. Storage capacity in drives has seemed to become a non-issue for a lot of new systems. On Newegg.com right now, there are Western Digital drives with a capacity of 1TB for a trivial $159. RAIDs can improve the read speeds, capacity, and reliability of storage systems, but drives still remain somewhat slow. These drives will be expensive, no doubt, but hopefully a vast improvement on their 10,000 and 15,000RPM predecessors. Bit-tech has also reported that sources at Western Digital have said that a priority on the drive is also noise, which I imagine would become a problem with a disk spinning that fast. They plan on releasing the drive as a 2.5″ form factor and creating a 3.5″ housing to allow it to fit into larger bays. Solid state disks are definitely coming and definitely here to stay, however they’re not here yet. Cost and capacity are currently the two biggest concerns, as well as some technical concerns of the drives over conventional hard disk drives.
I haven’t seen a projected release date, however it better come fast as solid state disks are on their way.
Tags: hard drives, performance, western digital
Filed under News :
Comments (0) :
Aug 18th, 2008
