> > to about 18Mbps, but I haven't felt it yet. -chris > > Linux does not swap enough. Remove some RAM :-) > > More seriously, I guess that if Linux has lots of RAM to play with > (here swap in use <10% RAM), and a big cache (30-50% RAM), you're not > going to saturate your disk bandwidth in the first place. So increasing > it by a factor of 6 is not going to help since it was not the bottleneck > in the first place. > Also under such conditions whether reads or writes are slow is not > really important since reads are read ahead, as long as the data arrives > before you need it it's fine, and writes go to the cache and don't have > to be flushed all that often. > Finally the only cases where disk access will have an influence is > when the read-ahead occasionally fails. In that case It's most likely > going to be a latency issue, i.e. what's your seek time. And I believe > hdparm cannot help enhance this aspect.
What about when I start netscape? I hear the disk crunching, so presumably the binary isn't cached. Shouldn't increasing the disk throughput speed up the time it takes to start netscape? -chris
