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Date:      Thu, 19 Sep 1996 14:53:04 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com (Rodney W. Grimes)
Cc:        jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: News server...
Message-ID:  <199609191953.OAA11437@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <199609191800.LAA07104@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> from "Rodney W. Grimes" at Sep 19, 96 11:00:22 am

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> Perhaps some one should dig up the 1987 UCB paper by Patterson, Gibson
> and Katz titled ``A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)'',
> I am sure they covered something about configuring the stripe size
> very large for high TPS rates, and very small for high bandwidth.  Ah..
> I did find the UCB report number: UCB/CSD 87/391.

FOUND it!  THANKS Rod, you are always a wealth of valuable knowledge...

http://cs-tr.cs.berkeley.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Page/ncstrl.ucb/csd-87-391/10?npages=26

"A better measure for database systems is the number of _individual_ reads
or writes per second.  [...]  Ideally during small transfers each disk in a
group can act independently, either reading or writing independent
information."

http://cs-tr.cs.berkeley.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Page/ncstrl.ucb/csd-87-391/11?npages=26

(nice picture)

However, the paper is entirely too preoccupied with the "R" in RAID, and
does not give a lot of information about stripe sizes, etc.

http://cs-tr.cs.berkeley.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Page/ncstrl.ucb/csd-87-391/22?npages=26

is probably the most "useful" if you simply look at the grey bars in the
data plot, but is still comparing mirrored or redundant disks...

> I did find this in some other sales lit I have:
>   ``In I/O intensive environments, performance is optimized by striping
>   the drives in the array with stripes large enough so that each record
>   potentially falls entierely within on stripe.''
>   ...
> 
>   Unfortunately, small stripes rule out multiple overlapped I/O operations,
>   since each I/O will typically involve all drives.''

Big nod.

> I think in the usenet news engine case we can safely call the update
> record a ``cylinder group'', since any file add/remove/read is almost
> always going to fall within 1 cylinder group (except when UFS's optimizations
> fail.)

Well, that was MY logic...!  :-)  And I know it is not "perfect", but it
is the best tradeoff I could envision.

... Joe

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Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/546-7968



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