ZFS-lighttpd2-sendfile, too high IO

[Ivan Voras]

On 12/09/2011 21:32, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, Laszlo KAROLYI wrote:
> 
>> But does this explain the 4-5mbyte/s reads when having a 15mbit/s
>> network load?
> 
> There are only two viable explanations:
> 
>   o Insuffient caching due to insufficient resources
> 
>   o Data is not being cached at all
> 
> Zfs reads whole 128K blocks (or whatever the filesystem blocksize is) at
> a time.  It does not read partial blocks from underlying storage. This
> makes it very expensive to perform many small read accesses if the reads
> are not subsequently cached in the ARC.

Yes!

Which makes it particularly "interesting" if you try to run a database
on it while forgetting to reset the block size to e.g. 8K before the
database is initialized - you get 16x more IO than you expected.