Reading few large blocks instead of many small when executing a file?
Hans Lofving (hans.316@brfmasthugget.se)
Mon, 28 Dec 1998 18:28:33 +0100
Hi all, I hope this is the right place to post this to, forgive me if it
is not.
I was reading "The Linux Kernel" (
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/LDP/tlk/tlk.html ) and, please correct me if
I'm wrong, but as far as I understood the mm part of tlk, linux only
reads the size of one memory page from an executable file when it is
run, and then, each time more of the file needs to be read from the
hard drive, only one page at a time will be read.
It struck me that reading for example 16kb at once is a lot faster than
reading 4kb 4 times. So why not read 4 or 8 pages at every segfault (and
when the program ? I am very uncertain about if this is a good idea or
not, I understand that this would not be a good idea for systems with
not so much memory, but will it not be a performance boost for systems
that can "afford" this memory waste? Perhaps the number of pages that
Linux should read at a time could be configurable at compile time or
even when Linux is running through the /proc filesystem? Or perhaps the
amount of pages read at a time could be decided by looking at the size
of the executable? If this is just a very stupid idea please let me
know, so that i can forget about it as soon as possible =)
-- Hans Löfving
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