Re: [squid-users] Tweaking Disk Access on Linux

Not appropriate for the Squid-users mailing list. There are many newbie
Linux lists where this is appropriate. (And a search on
http://www.google/linux for hdparm reveals, as it's first reply, a good
article at O'Reillynet about it's use).

For Squid specific references to this it is documented in my tuning
Squid article:

http://www.swelltech.com/pengies/joe/squidtuneup/t1.html

Leonardo Rodrigues wrote:

> Hello Guys,
>
> I know Linux has an utility called hdparm. It seems that this utility can be used to 'tweak' some HD/controller parameters, speeding up I/O stuff.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1) Am I Right ? Can hdparm really be used to tweak something, and make disk access faster ?

Yes. It can, in some circumstances, make disk access faster. It can
also make it much slower and more likely to have data corruption.

> 2) If yes, I'd like some examples and opinions on how using it, if possible. Links would be equally useful.

Search engines are your friend. (And the above link to the Squid tuning
article will provide a mostly safe example of turning on UDMA.)

> 3) If 1 is yes, can it be used on IDE and SCSI disks, or only in one of them ?

hdparm now works for both. However, most of the disk features that
hdparm controls only exist on IDE drives, and thus is much less useful
for SCSI disks (and probably more dangerous). So use it to turn on UDMA
mode and possibly 32bit access, if they are not on in your drives by
default. Beyond that, you're asking for trouble and a slower disk.

                                   --
                      Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
                  Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
                         http://www.swelltech.com
Received on Fri May 11 2001 - 13:27:33 MDT