I been running a hopefully simple fio test, but I don't understand the results. the test :- fio --name=f1 --directory=/sda --rw=rw --size=400m --name=f2 --directory=/sdb --rw=write --size=1g --startdelay=10 on linux 2.6.30-git running this takes quite while, 'time fio ...' gives real 3m49.174s user 0m0.838s sys 0m7.990s (edited highlights of the fio output) f1: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=5181 read : io=200MiB, bw=23,480KiB/s, iops=5,870, runt= 8722msec write: io=200MiB, bw=23,499KiB/s, iops=5,874, runt= 8715msec f2: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=5182 write: io=1,024MiB, bw=77,231KiB/s, iops=19,307, runt= 13577msec The jobs seem to finish reasonable quickly, but then fio seem to be stuck waiting for something. CPU usage is 100% but the CPU frequency stays at the lowest level and the system is really sluggish in its response. It does recover in time but this test does seem to torture my system. strace shows fio repeating this :- open and read several disk stats, such as open("/sys/block/sdb/stat", O_RDONLY) = 10 fstat(10, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7ff9ef70c000 read(10, " 45168 22897 2239004 1505"..., 4096) = 99 close(10) = 0 munmap(0x7ff9ef70c000, 4096) = 0 then... gettimeofday({1245665343, 22984}, NULL) = 0 gettimeofday({1245665343, 23015}, NULL) = 0 ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0 gettimeofday({1245665343, 23086}, NULL) = 0 gettimeofday({1245665343, 23115}, NULL) = 0 gettimeofday({1245665343, 23150}, NULL) = 0 setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 250000}}, NULL) = 0 rt_sigreturn(0) = -1 EINTR (Interrupted system call) wait4(5321, 0x7fffcfed49d4, WNOHANG, NULL) = 0 nanosleep({0, 10000000}, NULL) = 0 wait4(5321, 0x7fffcfed49d4, WNOHANG, NULL) = 0 nanosleep({0, 10000000}, NULL) = 0 ... wait4(5321, 0x7fffcfed49d4, WNOHANG, NULL) = 0 nanosleep({0, 10000000}, NULL) = 0 then back to the open & reads.. The machine is a AMD X2 64bit with 3G memory & fio is 1.26. Any ideas what's going on? or suggestions to help track it down? thanks Richard -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe fio" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html