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From: root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (root)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Hard Disk Performance tests, comments invited
Summary: Disk performance is more than *just* transfer speed
Message-ID: <1728@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 88 13:42:35 GMT
References: <10150@cup.portal.com> <5030@cbmvax.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
Lines: 37

In article <5030@cbmvax.UUCP>, jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) writes:
> In article <10150@cup.portal.com> thad@cup.portal.com (Thad Thad Floryan) writes:
> 	Suns? Ha! Slow as worms!  :-)  And anything with an _INTEL_ processor?
> Evil, kill it before it infects something, slower than molasses!  :-)

	Wouldn't be too quick to downside Sun disk performance, even
	in jest :-).  The Sun may not deliver the absolute transfer
	speed of FFS, but it will continue to deliver the same
	transfer speed on day 1 after the initial format and on
	day N.  Unless FFS has some reasonable fragmentation control
	algorithms you're going to suffer the same slow downs that
	the "old" Unix filesystem did, ie freshly formatted you got
	~150 kBytes/sec, after a few weeks you had only ~30 kBytes/sec
	performance.  The Sun filesystem also delivers more file
	information, eg creation/modification/access dates, ownership
	and symbolic/hard links.  So let's not just key on who fast
	we can do 1 mByte reads.  The Sun filesystem also has tools
	for crash recovery; too often I've heard the only tool available
	for Amiga FS recovery is diskdoctor followed by a format.

	** Note: I am not bashing FFS; Steve has done a really fine job
	   on it.  I am merely pointing out that we've a ways to go on
	   Amiga before we even reach the current state of the art in Unix
	   systems.

> 	Diskperfa is rather dependant on stdio/library implementation.  Most 
> of the calls used are C library calls meant to emulate Unix calls, and may
> therefor have some amount of overhead.  For the read/write speeds, I'd think
> that the speed of Read() and Write() would be better benchmarks (and less
> dependant on compiler library implementation).

	It is pretty trivial to mung diskperfa to use Read/Write - I did
	this when I wrote it and found that the overhead that Manx adds
	is fairly neglible.  

						Rick Spanbauer
						SUNY/Stony Brook