The New Linux Speed Trick

Brainsur quotes a story saying " Linux kernel 2.6 introduces improved IO scheduling that can increase speed -- "sometimes by 1,000 percent or more, [more] often by 2x" -- for standard desktop workloads, and by as much as 15 percent on many database workloads, according to Andrew Morton of Open Source Development Labs. This increased speed is accomplished by minimizing the disk head movement during concurrent reads. "

It kindof Early to be Slashdoted

[stecoop]

It seems that the server isn't running the speed improvment becuase its probably slashdotted.

The system was unable to communicate with the server.

Stolen from SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, this was stolen from SCO. This was based on their UNIX software and was available in the baseline from 10 years ago. It only shows that Linux, once again, is not an innovator, but just copies code from SCO to achive its scalability.

Re:Linux Speed (Or Lack Thereof)

[Anonymous Coward]

Try going outside. Find out about these things called "women".

Or switch to using BSD. Then you get computers and women [spilth.org].

Re:Linux Speed (Or Lack Thereof)

[Eastree]

>Try going outside. Find out about these things called "women".

And this would help my computer how?

Re:Linux Speed (Or Lack Thereof)

[Anonymous Coward]

*ugly* women? no thanks :)

I think I've heard of this

[TheVidiot]

Doesn't this involve a green marker, and tracing along the edge of the hard drive? Faster and less distortion?

Re:Our take on it from inside MSFT

[BCoates]

Your comment is meaningless gibberish studded with technobabble.

I believe you, you must really work at Microsoft.

Re:1,000 percent?

[rikkus-x]

But it's speed reduction, so...

100% = 1/2 the time.
200% = 1/2 of 1/2 the time, which is 1/4 the time.
300% = 1/8 the time.
1000% = 1/1024 the time.

Which is a 1023/1024 improvement, or only 0.999x, so disk access is in fact slightly slower!

Yes, I'm really bad at maths.

Rik

[ot]

[mirko]

Thanks but my father is Croatian and my Mom's French :o)
Anyway, you found out that I indeed am not a native English speaker, hence the neologistications.

Re:SCSI

[Anonymous Coward]

An uptime of 0.8 days isn't really that impressive...

It's obviously been a long time since you used Windows.

BSOD scheduler has been O(-1) like, eh, forever

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that makes the BSOD scheduler O(-1) or so - the more you use the computer, the faster that scheduler works.

Re:Cool

[dave420]

I love slashdot. I'm talking about the story, and it's modded as offtopic. I think the words "to my bias" should be added to the mod options :-P

"offtopic to my bias"
"troll to my bias"

etc ;)

as the only way you get modded accurately is if you're in the same camp as the moderator. I'm clearly not.

Re:Oh, come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

For very large values of 1....

Believe it!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all very true. Not moving the disk head is everything.

In fact, my research group discovered this years ago - and precisely because of this we developed a hard drive with a single track. It had 65,536 heads and was very fast.

It was also about two city blocks in diameter. It got torn down because we were violating municipal building ordinances. Shame.