What does the memory-related stats from "top" show you? Did you have any
other memory intensive applications running at the time? A random
example from one of my systems (1GB RAM):
Thanks, good point - but no - absolutely nothing (machine is freshly
booted, and the only thing running is this test).
Before:
------
Mem: 4672K Active, 4260K Inact, 20M Wired, 14M Buf, 1974M Free
After:
-----
Mem: 5124K Active, 681M Inact, 126M Wired, 112M Buf, 1191M Free
As I understand it, the pages for the file are cached in Inactive and
the 112M Buf is essentially a 'window' to access 'em (probably said that
a little wrong... someone who knows better can hopefully correct me)
That should give you an idea as to how much RAM is being used for the
buffer/block IO cache ("111M Buf" in the above example, as I understand
it), and the VM disk cache ("36M Cache" in the above example).
You might also want to look at:
sysctl vfs.
and see whether or not there is anything there that may affect it. For
instance, whether there is a maximum size in terms of files that will be
cached...? Someone with more VFS/etc knowledge than I may be able to
better advise you there...
Thanks - I'll look into these.
It might be worthwhile trying with a series of different file size to
determine if there is a point where the caching performance drops... I
just did a few quick tests on a relatively old machine (2x P3-933Mhz,
1GB RAM)... in this case, /tmp is on a 3ware SATA RAID controller
(8xxx?) running RAID1 on two 160gb SATA disks)...
Well that proved to be interesting: anything much bigger than 100M is
pretty flat at 350MB/s...
Cached file size read rate (8k blocks)
---------------- ---------
100MB 510MB/s
150MB 350MB/s
200MB 350MB/s
800MB 350MB/s
1.6Gb 350MB/s
(Off-topic: a 2.5GB file still gets close to 350MB/s even tho it is -
obviously - partially cached, helped no doubt by a fast IO system -
3ware 75xx + 4 disk RAID0, which can do 195MB/s for the uncached
sections of the file...).
Cheers
Mark
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