Hi Everyone,

Hope all is well. I have a question regarding read-ahead caching.

Are there any downsides to raising the size of the read-ahead cache?

On our farm, we're currently running at 256, and upon raising that higher, we are seeing significant throughput gains.

[root@server~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: 
Timing cached reads: 7352 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3677.62 MB/sec 3
Timing buffered disk reads: 244 MB in 3.10 seconds = 78.68 MB/sec 

[root@server ~]# blockdev --setra 10240 /dev/sda 

[root@server ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: 
Timing cached reads: 11452 MB in 2.00 seconds = 5728.52 MB/sec 
Timing buffered disk reads: 422 MB in 3.17 seconds = 133.04 MB/sec

We are running on 2.6. Thanks!