FLAC I/O less efficient than STDIN, Direct file access can be almost twice slower than STDIN Options

[skamp]

I was optimizing caudec when I came across this oddity. Basically, letting /usr/bin/flac access .flac files on a slowish HDD directly for decoding ('flac -d file.flac') was in one particular case almost twice slower than piping the files to /usr/bin/flac via STDIN ('cat file.flac | flac -d -').

I used a double album for testing, made of 37 tracks for a total of about 1 GiB, located on a HDD that tops out at about 70 MB/s. Incidentally, flac decodes on my machine at a similar rate.

I ran caudec twice (figuratively - I repeated the tests many times) with 8 concurrent processes, for decoding those FLAC files to WAV on a ramdisk. I made sure to drop all caches between each run. First run was with direct file access, and completed in 40 seconds. Second run was with piping to STDIN, and completed in 25 seconds.

The difference was much less pronounced, surprisingly, on a USB flash drive that tops out at 35 MB/s, 34 seconds vs. 30 seconds, and non-existant on a RAID 1 array that tops out at 130 MB/s and on a SSD that tops out at 500 MB/s. I experienced similar differences with WavPack.

Does anyone have any idea of what's going on?

[Axon]

Cool.

Note that --setra and --setra are completely different settings IIRC. Setting these values too high could compromise performance on other applications, so unless the drive is devoted to music, you should probably tune them down appropriately.

I'm rather curious as to if you can improve performance at the default readahead values by instead tuning CFQ params.

[skamp]

I'm rather curious as to if you can improve performance at the default readahead values by instead tuning CFQ params.

Yes: 23 seconds with CFQ/readahead at 256 (vs. 40 seconds with deadline), 17 seconds with CFQ/readahead at 16384.

I completely forgot that I changed the scheduler to deadline years ago.

[Axon]

I'm rather curious as to if you can improve performance at the default readahead values by instead tuning CFQ params.

Yes: 23 seconds with CFQ/readahead at 256 (vs. 40 seconds with deadline), 17 seconds with CFQ/readahead at 16384.

I completely forgot that I changed the scheduler to deadline years ago.

Yes, I could understand how CFQ would perform better in this sort of workload. But 1MiB readahead still seems a *tad* too high. I was imagining that tweaking things like /sys/block/*/queue/iosched/slice_idle (or other settings described in cfq-iosched.txt) could help.

This post has been edited by Axon: Nov 28 2012, 01:24