Monday, October 15, 2007

Effect of buffer size for reading files [Linux]

Reading a file entirely in memory is not a good idea as stated before, but how large should be the memory buffer?

I did a test under Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) reading the fpc2.2.0 installation file (29MB) using different buffer sizes.

Here's the result:


The time to read the file decreases as the buffer size increases until the buffer is 128kb then, as the buffer gets bigger, the trend inverts.

Some notes:
  • The test was executed three times for each buffer size. The results are expressed as the Median;
  • The Y axis is the time to read all the file in microseconds. The X axis is the buffer size in bytes;
  • The first time the file is read is significantly slower than subsequent reads. Probably this is an effect of the OS file system buffering (I did not find a way to skip it). This limits further analysis. However, excluding the first run, all other results are consistent across the same buffer size. All results can be browsed here.

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