Minimizing IO overhead and maximizing bandwidth frees power to actually process the data.įigure 1 shows how data flows in a modern storage subsystem. High-speed sequential IO is also an important factor in the startup of interactive applications. High-speed sequential access is important for bulk data operations typically found in utility, multimedia, data mining, and scientific applications. This combination allows us to reach or exceed the half-power point of all the individual hardware components. The best performance is achieved by using large requests, bypassing the file system cache, spreading the data across many disks and controllers, and using deep-asynchronous requests. We show that NTFS out-of-the-box performance is quite good, but overheads for small requests can be quite high. We provide details of the overhead costs at each level of the system and examine a variety of the available tuning knobs.
The study explores the performance of Intel Pentium Pro™ based memory and IO subsystems, including the processor bus, the PCI bus, the SCSI bus, the disk controllers, and the disk media in a typical server or high-end desktop system. This paper investigates the performance of reading and writing large sequential files using the Windows NT™ 4.0 File System.
A Performance Study of Sequential I/O on Windows NT( TM) 4Įrik Riedel, Carnegie Mellon University, van Ingen, Jim Gray, Microsoft Research, database, data mining, and multimedia applications require large, sequential transfers and have bandwidth as a key requirement.