/proc/partitions statistics question

From: Jean-Luc Fontaine
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 14:37:42 EST


I have been trying to make sense of the units used in the /proc/partitions statistics.
I thought read and write I/O were in kilobytes, but not according to the following test on my 2.4.3 kernel machine:

# /proc/partitions columns:
# major minor #blocks name rio rmerge rsect ruse wio wmerge wsect wuse running use aveq

$ fgrep hdb1 /proc/partitions
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=ttt bs=1M count=1024 2>/dev/null
$ sync; sync; sync
$ fgrep hdb1 /proc/partitions
3 65 40209088 hdb1 7107 18180 202278 384530 7925 19005 215616 215330 0 46240 599860
3 65 40209088 hdb1 7134 18218 202798 386510 24566 265384 2319776 2977060 0 102000 3363570
$ ls -lk ttt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1048576 Dec 13 15:56 ttt
$ fgrep hdb1 /proc/partitions
$ dd if=ttt of=/dev/null 2>/dev/null
$ sync; sync; sync
$ fgrep hdb1 /proc/partitions
3 65 40209088 hdb1 7152 18222 202974 386650 24581 265397 2320000 2977060 0 102140 3363710
3 65 40209088 hdb1 23567 263977 2300334 555980 24668 265441 2321048 2978280 0 171380 3534260

(24566 - 7925) = 16641 were written, whereas
(23567 - 7152) = 16415 were read
I would have expected something near 1048576 (kilobytes),
but the results seem to be roughly 64 times less...

I would really appreciate an explanation, as I use those statistics
in a monitoring program and for filesystems performance tests.

Many thanks for your help!

--
Jean-Luc Fontaine mailto:jfontain@xxxxxxx http://jfontain.free.fr/
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