Solution (Was: Sparc has slow disk access)

["Tille, Andreas" <TilleA@rki.de>]

Hello,

people might remember my question about the E250 server with slower
disk access than a usual PC which I testet by some dd copying.  Now
I found a solution:

$ dd if=hd-test.filenof=hd-test.file.out bs=1024k
                                         ^^^^^^^^

Seems that there were not an optimal bs-default value on Sparc for this
test.  If I set bs explicitely this way I got:

Sparc/Solaris:  45s
Sparc/Linux:    35s   !! (We are really good, aren´t we?)
PC/Linux:       61s

By the way it would be of course interesting, how to adjust reading
block size in other applications than dd.  I started testing when I
recognized that some PostgreSQL tables I created via

   cat tabledefinition | psql database

took much more time than on my PC.  Moreover I´m afraid that database
access is slower if some parts of it do not fit into memory.

Any hints how to tune that?

Kind regards

        Andreas.