Re: O.T. optimising file placement
Martin Gregorie wrote:
Unlike some, I take a good deal of interest in what my machines are up
to, so I was quoting what I see using top on my Linux systems. During
normal operation there is very little activity on my laptop except from
the programs I'm actively using unless, as you say, logwatch/smartd/
rkhunter/updatedb get run by atd, but on a reasonably quick machine they
don't run for long.
Of course, the house server is a different case, since it has several
24/7 services on it, but again its only heavy, continuous disk activity
is overnight when it runs backups/logwatch/smartd/updatedb. Apart from
that requests that wake up Postfix/Spamassassin/Apache/or ftpd/sshd are
pretty sporadic and the disk LED flashes are best described as
intermittent.
Sounds like disk optimizations would help that system.
The longest continuously busy time on either machine is during backups
and even there there precious little contention since rsync or tar+gzip
since the only stuff being written to the disk its reading from are
backup logs. Same applies to software update sessions. To the best of my
knowledge (and watching top) none of yum, rpm, tar, gzip or rsync are
multi-threaded: rsync is probably using poll() based async i/o but from
top and observed behaviour none of the others seem to do that. In fact
the only long-running programs on my systems that I know to be multi-
threaded are Apache, Postgres, SA and Postfix.
Now /that/ is objective evidence.
In your particular case you have no need of optimization of your disk
processes. You don't mention it but by omission I will grant you that virtual
memory on your system does not seriously contend for disk either. But a
typical consumer scenario is to listen to a stream while surfing the web on
Windows with several chat windows open, causing multiple disk IO ops on a
constant basis of themselves and also putting pressure on virtual memory. Even
such a single-user system can benefit from elevator seeking and on-disk buffers.
Consider also that burstiness of demand does not argue against the need for
optimization, really. During bursts the optimization helps, and a user might
complain if their disks got weird once an hour.
Regardless, if you don't need optimization why worry? It's like the Pope
comparing brands of condoms.
Again, we don't excoriate the value of optimizations by citing examples where
optimization isn't needed. We evaluate optimizations by how useful they are
when they are needed.
--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Friz.jpg