Re: Slow FFSv1 file system performance

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Christopher Berardi
<cberardi%natoufa.com@localhost> wrote:
>But, much
> to my chagrin it was considerably slower. It was at least 4 times slower than
> the Windows version.

> Any ideas on why the lack of performance?

Did you turn on write caching on the disk? I think Windows does it by
default, but NetBSD doesn't. If it's an IDE/SATA disk, do this:

dkctl <disk> getcache. For example:

# dkctl wd0 getcache
/dev/rwd0d: read cache enabled
/dev/rwd0d: read cache enable is not changeable
/dev/rwd0d: write cache enable is changeable
/dev/rwd0d: cache parameters are not savable
# dkctl wd0 setcache rw
# dkctl wd0 getcache
/dev/rwd0d: read cache enabled
/dev/rwd0d: write-back cache enabled
/dev/rwd0d: read cache enable is not changeable
/dev/rwd0d: write cache enable is changeable
/dev/rwd0d: cache parameters are not savable

That should make a big difference, something like 2x to 3x faster with
regular file I/O. Not sure about directories but it should be similar
I guess. Mounting with async might be a similar change though.

Andy