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authorivoras <ivoras@FreeBSD.org>2010-08-12 21:21:50 +0000
committerivoras <ivoras@FreeBSD.org>2010-08-12 21:21:50 +0000
commit534250dae1a0424b85f00f100b5636175befba65 (patch)
tree15c1aa5efec0e726c6cfad01cdf860b82f6a6d93 /share/man/man7
parent10d63a94a97ccfa8ed87bbb189685811693e2574 (diff)
downloadFreeBSD-src-534250dae1a0424b85f00f100b5636175befba65.zip
FreeBSD-src-534250dae1a0424b85f00f100b5636175befba65.tar.gz
Describe vfs.read_max and update vfs.hirunningspace documentation. While
there, update nits. Considered viewed by: jeff, phk, rwatson
Diffstat (limited to 'share/man/man7')
-rw-r--r--share/man/man7/tuning.736
1 files changed, 27 insertions, 9 deletions
diff --git a/share/man/man7/tuning.7 b/share/man/man7/tuning.7
index a87df57..6f9e9cb 100644
--- a/share/man/man7/tuning.7
+++ b/share/man/man7/tuning.7
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
.\"
.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
-.Dd January 23, 2009
+.Dd August 11, 2010
.Dt TUNING 7
.Os
.Sh NAME
@@ -470,7 +470,7 @@ sysctl defaults to 1 (on).
This parameter controls how directories are cached
by the system.
Most directories are small and use but a single fragment
-(typically 1K) in the file system and even less (typically 512 bytes) in
+(typically 2K) in the file system and even less (typically 512 bytes) in
the buffer cache.
However, when operating in the default mode the buffer
cache will only cache a fixed number of directories even if you have a huge
@@ -504,17 +504,35 @@ it off.
The
.Va vfs.hirunningspace
sysctl determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to
-disk controllers system-wide at any given instance.
-The default is
-usually sufficient but on machines with lots of disks you may want to bump
-it up to four or five megabytes.
+disk controllers system-wide at any given time.
+It is used by the UFS file system.
+The default is self-tuned and
+usually sufficient but on machines with advanced controllers and lots
+of disks this may be tuned up to match what the controllers buffer.
+Configuring this setting to match tagged queuing capabilities of
+controllers or drives with average IO size used in production works
+best (for example: 16 MiB will use 128 tags with IO requests of 128 KiB).
Note that setting too high a value
(exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely
bad clustering performance.
Do not set this value arbitrarily high!
-Also,
-higher write queueing values may add latency to reads occurring at the same
-time.
+Higher write queueing values may also add latency to reads occurring at
+the same time.
+.Pp
+The
+.Va vfs.read_max
+sysctl governs VFS read-ahead and is expressed as the number of blocks
+to pre-read if the heuristics algorithm decides that the reads are
+issued sequentially.
+It is used by the UFS, ext2fs and msdosfs file systems.
+With the default UFS block size of 16 KiB, a setting of 32 will allow
+speculatively reading up to 512 KiB.
+This setting may be increased to get around disk I/O latencies, especially
+where these latencies are large such as in virtual machine emulated
+environments.
+It may be tuned down in specific cases where the I/O load is such that
+read-ahead adversely affects performance or where system memory is really
+low.
.Pp
There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls.
We do not recommend modifying these values.
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