[squid-users] Number of Spindles

Hi,

I was reading through Duane Wessel's book, and I must say, it is a GREAT
book. If only I had read it earlier, my life would've been so much better!
:)

I was reading through Appendix D: Filesystem Performance benchmarks, where
Duane says the following:

"The primary purpose of these tests is to show that Squid's performance
doesn't increase in proportion to the number of disk drives. Excluding other
factors, you may be able to get better performance from three systems with
one disk drive each, rather than a single system with three drives."

Isn't this contrary to what we've been seeing over and over again in the
forum, that increasing the number of spindles distributes disk IO, and
increases cache efficiency by avoiding io_wait for the CPU? Or is it that,
when you use SCSI U320 HDDs, your io_wait becomes a non issue, and that is
what Duane was referring to when he started the concluding line with
"Excluding other factors"?

Could the gurus in this forum please shed some light on this?

Regards
HASSAN
Received on Sun Nov 30 2008 - 03:56:38 MST