On Fri, May 24 2013, Matthew Eaton wrote: > Hello fio group, > > Can anyone tell me if --buffer_compress_percentage fills the buffer > with random data and reuses that data or if it refills with random > data for each submit? If you want the latter behavior should you > combine with --refill_buffers? That is actually explained in the man page / HOWTO: buffer_compress_percentage=int If this is set, then fio will attempt to provide IO buffer content (on WRITEs) that compress to the specified level. Fio does this by providing a mix of random data and zeroes. Note that this is per block size unit, for file/disk wide compression level that matches this setting, you'll also want to set refill_buffers. So the answer to your question is yes. Fio will reuse IO buffers, unless --refill_buffers is set. If you do not set refill_buffers with buffer_compress_percentage, then you will have identically compressible blocks written. And that would only give you the per-block compression ratio specified, on a broader scale it would compress more. -- Jens Axboe -- 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