Michael S (already5chosen@yahoo.com) on 1/10/09 wrote:
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>iz (indan@nul.nu) on 1/10/09 wrote:
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>>
>>Umm, git? ;-)
>>
>>The closest I come to a streaming write load is probably a system update, but that's
>>still all over the place. Everything else is pretty much synchronized random writes
>>(sync in the sense something is waiting till it's all written safely, not necessarily all in the same order).
>>
>
>Sounds like you don't compile large programs as often as Linus does.

I hope not... But I don't think that compiling large programs is a streaming write load though. Or put it another way, my painfully slow laptop hard disk that does barely 18 Mb/s can keep up with a kernel compile. For a 5x faster modern cpu a modern drive will be 5x as fast as well.

A quick look at the files generated by a kernel compile (make O=../obj) shows that out of the 3333 files, only 562 are 10K or more. 252 files are 20K or more. Granted, most of those files can be placed adjacent to each other, but there's a lot of metadata updating going on as well, which is, at least with ext3, rather random. The biggest file is vmlinux.o with 5MB.