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Re: Get the underlying cache block size of a filesystem?
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Re: Get the underlying cache block size of a filesystem?


  • Subject: Re: Get the underlying cache block size of a filesystem?
  • From: Toby Thain <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:55:04 -0500


On 11-Feb-10, at 11:20 AM, James Bucanek wrote:

Greetings,

Disclaimer: I'm a big propionate of "don't fight the OS" and "don't reinvent the wheel", but sometimes you just have to. My application presents a pathological case that is discordant with the filesystem's natural caching algorithm, and I'm trying to find a more efficient solution.

Scenario: I have a very large index file (GBs) that has millions of very small records (12 bytes each). Records are read stochastically while parsing an incoming stream of data. You can guess what happens: (1) an entire of block of data is read from the disk and cached, (2) 12 bytes are extracted, (3) the block eventually gets pushed out of the cache by other file activity, process repeats.

The result is that almost every record read incurs the overhead of reading the 4K/8K/32K/whatever block of data from the physical media. This effectively "overreads" hundreds of potentially interesting records in the same block, discards them, and reads them again next time.

So the standard wisdom of "let the OS cache the data" isn't working here.

Did you explore using a [R]DBMS?

--Toby



I've *significantly* improved performance by creating my own in- memory cache records. ...


Thanks!
--
James Bucanek

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