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[[!meta title="Disk I/O Performance Tuning"]]
The most obvious reason for the Hurd feeling slow compared to mainstream
systems like GNU/Linux, is very slow harddisk access.
The reason for this slowness is lack and/or bad implementation of common
optimisation techniques, like scheduling reads and writes to minimalize head
movement; effective block caching; effective reads/writes to partial blocks;
reading/writing multiple blocks at once; and read-ahead. The
[[ext2_filesystem_server|hurd/translator/ext2fs]] might also need some
optimisations at a higher logical level.
The goal of this project is to analyze the current situation, and implement/fix
various optimisations, to achieve significantly better disk performance. It
requires understanding the data flow through the various layers involved in
disk acces on the Hurd ([[filesystem|hurd/virtual_file_system]],
[[pager|hurd/libpager]], driver), and general experience with
optimising complex systems. That said, the killing feature we are definitely
missing is the read-ahead, and even a very simple implementation would bring
very big performance speedups.
Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi)
Exercise: Look through all the code involved in disk I/O, and try something
easy to improve. It's quite likely though that you will find nothing obvious --
in this case, please contact us about a different exercise task.
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