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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. "

2 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. I've noticed it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm having trouble getting ACPI working in my laptop in the 2.6 kernel (it's a bad implementation on the part of my laptop). The 2.4 series used to work (sometimes) so I installed Mandrake's 2.4 kernel and 2.6 kernels on my laptop. Using 2.4.x again was like switching to a horse and buggy from a sport-cars; KDE was that much faster with the 2.6.x kernel running the show.

  2. Amiga Disks by tonywestonuk · · Score: 5, Interesting


    When I had an Amiga (aroung '91ish), even though It was fully multitasking, I learnt to never open any app while another was loading. If you did, you could hear the disk head moving back and forward between two sectors on disk every half second or so, slowing both app launches to a crawl. Waiting until one loaded, and launching the second was many times faster.

    I've always wondered why there wasn't something in the OS to force this behaviour, Ie, making sure that App 2 access to the disk is queued until app 1 has finished. Isn't this one of the reasons Windows takes ages to boot? (many processes all competing for the one disk resource?).