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Date:      Mon, 1 Mar 1999 19:59:32 -0800 (PST)
From:      Tom <tom@uniserve.com>
To:        David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
Cc:        Andrew McNaughton <andrew@squiz.co.nz>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: rc5des slows tape thruput 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9903011955220.21869-100000@shell.uniserve.ca>
In-Reply-To: <199903020244.UAA02047@nospam.hiwaay.net>

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On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, David Kelly wrote:

> Andrew McNaughton writes:
> >
> > Does the tape process get niced also then?
> 
> No.
> 
> > Is the nice setting reasonable?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > If not then why is rc5des allowed to slow it so much?
> 
> The picture that I'm getting is a single block is written to the tape 
> drive at a time. When the tape drive is ready for another block 
> rc5des's current time slice is not aborted but allowed to complete 
> before dd gets a time slice to queue another block to the tape.
> 
> The drive at home has 1M of internal RAM, the DDS-3 drives at work have 
> 2M buffers. It would appear FreeBSD doesn't make use of these buffers.

  I don't see how that could be.  SCSI tapes are SCSI tapes.  Any
buffering done by the device should be invisible.  There might be a SCSI
mode page flag to turn it on or off though.

> > I don't imagine that dd to tape would need that much CPU. I'd expect
> > it to bottleneck on IO.  Is it something to do with needing very small
> > chunks of CPU t ime and running into lots of small waits for the
> > kernel's CPU time allocation?
> 
> A couple of percent. Using dd to read /dev/zero and write /dev/null 
> yields 208M/sec w/o rc5des running, 203M/sec with, writing 100000 
> blocks of 10k (roughly 1G) so the test runs long enough to be valid.

  Those figures are pretty weird.  208MB/s or ?  That is a pretty fast
tape drive.  /dev/zero isn't a good test source due to drive compression
and encoding stuff.

> --
> David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
> =====================================================================
> The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
> capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 


Tom
Systems Support
Uniserve



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