How can I make my HW RAID reads faster? (request for FAQ)

[J. Epperson]

On Fri, January 11, 2008 16:30, Ben Ruset wrote:
> is this something specific to XFS or would it work on RAID'ed ext3 file
> systems?

If you mean specifically the "blockdev --setra 16384", I've seen more
discussions of it in an ext3 environment than XFS.  It's affecting the
block layer, which underlies any filesystem type, so it _likely_ will
affect any type.  There doesn't seem to be a good understanding of why it
produces such dramatic performance improvements, particularly write
performance given that it's a readahead setting.  Something to do with
improving read/write contention, I'd think.

regards,
j.