Talk:Clarifying Direct IO's Semantics
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(Created page with 'The Solaris mount_ufs man page suggests: If forcedirectio is specified [...] data is transferred directly between user address space and the disk. ...') |
Revision as of 16:17, 27 August 2009
The Solaris mount_ufs man page suggests:
If forcedirectio is specified [...] data is transferred directly between user address space and the disk.
forcedirectio is a performance option that is of benefit only in large sequential data transfers. The default behavior is noforcedirectio.
[That was a quote: a paraphrase follows at the end of this page]
Note the mention of large sequential I/O: in a recent project we were pleased (and the customer was a little surprised) to find that Solaris UFS was coalescing many contiguous logical writes into a substantially smaller number of large physical writes. This improved their performance when doing full-table scans and large updates.
There is more discussion in the directio man page, where they note that buffered I/O is used if the buffer is misaligned or mmap'd, and:
Large sequential I/O generally performs best with DIRECTIO_ON, except when a file is sparse or is being extended and is opened with O_SYNC or O_DSYNC
[Another quote]
Again, they recommend direct i/o for large read or writes.
To paraphrase for copyright purposes, one might say:
Solaris provides "forcedirectio" as a mount option, and when it is applied, data is transferred without being copied to the buffer cache. It is recommended as a performance optimization when large amounts of data are transferred sequentially, unlike other discussion of direct I/O. In practice, forecedirectio indeed does appear to coalesce multiple contiguous logical writes into a substantially smaller number of larger physical writes. This improves performance when doing full-table scans or other large I/O operations.
See man mount_ufs(1M), directio(3C)
--dave