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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!swing.iinet.net.au!news.uoregon.edu!europa.chnt.gtegsc.com!news.kreonet.re.kr!news.dacom.co.kr!news.netins.net!solaris.cc.vt.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news.unt.edu!replicant.csci.unt.edu!jackson From: jackson@replicant.csci.unt.edu (Bruce Jackson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Striping Disks Date: 17 Oct 1995 17:54:01 GMT Organization: University of North Texas, Denton Lines: 29 Message-ID: <460qjp$2rb@hermes.acs.unt.edu> References: <460ogk$hnn@service2.uky.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: replicant.csci.unt.edu In article <460ogk$hnn@service2.uky.edu>, <soward@pop.uky.edu> wrote: > Anyone working on support for striping multiple disks into a larger > partition. This could really increase throughput on IO bound > machines, like inn servers, ect. Rumor has it that a Linux > implementation is being worked on. I would like to eventually see a virtual file system that allows mirroring and/or striping. Since there are several different ones among commercial OS's that I'm not familiar with I do not know the best one to model *BSD's on. To actually improve performance with disk striping would probably take a great deal of tuning. Seek times can become much worse with striping since a file access can involve multiple seeks with the transaction being held up by the last head to reach its data. Mirroring could be a better choice for filesystems that are read from much more frequently than writen to. The write penalty for mirroring would limit its usefullness for many types of filesystems though. For a NNTP server you may be able to improve performance simply by distributing the most heavily used directories on different disks. For example putting comp.* and alt.* on different physical disks may do a lot to speed up disk i/o. Of course the more RAM the better for news servers as well. -- Bruce Jackson | P. O. Box 13886-NT | GAB 550E UNIX Systems Admin. | Denton TX 76203-3886 | (817)565-2279 Computer Sciences | jackson@cs.unt.edu | FAX (817)565-2799 Univ. of North Texas | http://replicant.csci.unt.edu/~jackson/