Re: hdparm to increase performance

[Chris Majewski <majewski@cs.ubc.ca>]

> > 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