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The New Linux Speed Trick

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the benchmarking-the-beast dept.

Brainsur quotes a story saying " Linux kernel 2.6 introduces improved IO scheduling that can increase speed -- "sometimes by 1,000 percent or more, [more] often by 2x" -- for standard desktop workloads, and by as much as 15 percent on many database workloads, according to Andrew Morton of Open Source Development Labs. This increased speed is accomplished by minimizing the disk head movement during concurrent reads. "

4 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not combine those two methods? by mirko · · Score: 4, Insightful


    what would you have expected the kernel 2.8 to bring you ?
    </joke>

    Basically, I think this is like the windows system settings : you either privilegiate front end services (GUI) or back end services (apache, etc) but you cannot do both because some would be optimized for reactivity, the others to handle the workload... like a ferrari and a truck... this doesn't work nor excel in the same way.

    --
    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  2. Re:1,000 percent? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1,000 percent is 10x, but 1,000% improvement, being improvement by 10x, is 11x as good.

    Just as 50% is half, but 50% improvement is three halves as good.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  3. Retro is still cool ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's great watching the "modern" computer industry discover all the toys and optimisations that where essential engineering for the systems I used to use in the '70s & '80s.

    All the wonderful stuff like disk seek optimisation, interleaved memory (Even MMU came to the moden computer about 15 years after everyone else had it) were technologies that made systems stand out from each other.

    Because of the speed of things these days, lots of that tech has been largely ignored, until now when we're starting to hit hard performance barriers again. Now we have to invent the technology og the '70s all over again. It's nice to see all this stuff comming back though.

  4. Re:SCSI by jesup · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ATA is definitely not SCSI-over-IDE.
    ATAPI is SCSI-over-IDE however.

    I wrote the IDE/ATA drivers for the Amiga. The Amiga SCSI drivers accepted "SCSIDirect" commands from applications. Internally, all IO commands were converted to SCSIDirect commands for execution. To implement ATA, I added a SCSIDirect->ATA translator (which wasn't that hard - about 3 weeks from start to working, booting system - and I implemented just about all SCSI commands even semi-reasonable (all of CCS I think, plus quite a bit).

    Doing it this way made implementing support for ATAPI CDROMs (something I did as a contract after Commodore folded) Very Easy. :-)