Re: direct reads and writes on Solaris

Thanks, looks like that confirms my theory below. (Not sure how I didn't find those references myself--sorry.) I then have one related question.

We did some specific testing where we used a crude method to test I/O (specifically, write) performance. The test was this:

timex dd if=/dev/zero of=<device> bs=1024k count=2048

For the <device> we tried many different things. The interesting part (and here's where I'd like some input) is that the results for testing the same device via buffered (block) devices was much, much slower than the result for the unbuffered (char) device. All things equal, here are some sample tests:

/dev/vx/dsk/testdg/test

real 25.12
usr 0.02
sys 24.94

/dev/vx/rdsk/testdg/test

real 10.35
usr 0.01
sys 1.55

So, basically, it took more than 2x as long to do the dd to the buffered device as compared to the unbuffered device. I was sort of expecting that writes to the buffered device would be possibly a little faster or maybe about equal. I never expected to have such a big delta and I also didn't expect that so much system time would be spent just writing to a buffered device.

Any of you I/O gurus see anything interesting in these results? Are the testing methods even valid? My conclusion is that since we're likely doing buffered I/O now (since we're not doing directIO), that if we switched to doing directIO (which is unbuffered by definition), that we'd see considerable performance gain--at least for writes (since my test was only for writes). I would presume that reads might be a similar ratio though.

Dan

• Original Message ---- From: Ukja.dion <ukja.dion_at_gmail.com> To: dannorris_at_dannorris.com; Oracle L <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 5:55:18 PM Subject: RE: direct reads and writes on Solaris

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Visit
following URLs       

http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/Direct_I/O       

http://www.ixora.com.au/notes/filesystemio_options.htm                 

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Dan Norris

Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 7:14 AM

To: Oracle L

Subject: direct reads and writes on Solaris       

Can
someone help me interpret this set of data correctly?

The (vxfs) filesystem is mounted with these options:

/db51 on /dev/vx/dsk/oracledg/db18
read/write/setuid/mincache=direct/delaylog/largefiles/ioerror=mwdisable/dev=3ac36c1

This is 9.2.0.8 on Solaris 9 (V490, Generic_122300-07) with VxFS 4.1.

I have the following line in a truss of a dedicated server process:

open("/db51/oradata/tccrt1/member_questions_d01.dbf", O_RDWR|O_DSYNC) = 9

I also have the following settings in the DB:

NAME                                
TYPE        VALUE

------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------

disk_asynch_io                      
boolean     TRUE

filesystemio_options                
string      ASYNCH

The question(s):

I was expecting to see O_DIRECT in there somehow, but I'm thinking that maybe that's just on Linux, not Solaris. I don't see O_DIRECT listed in the open(2) manual page. I am also wondering if filesystemio_options needs to be "setall" instead of the current setting of "ASYNCH" in order to achieve directIO. Or, am I looking at the wrong thing to determine if directIO is enabled?

Thanks in advance!

Dan  

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