I am frustrated about the latency of random reading from a non-ssd disk. Based on results from following test program, it speeds ~16 ms for a random read of just 512 bytes without help of os cache.

I tried changing 512 to larger values, such as 25k, and the latency did not increase as much. I guess it is because the disk seek dominates the time.

I understand that random reading is inherently slow, but just want to be sure that ~16ms is reasonable, even for non-ssd disk.

#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  int fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
  if (fd < 0) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Failed open %s\n", argv[1]);
    return -1;
  }
  const size_t count = 512;
  const off_t offset = 25990611 / 2;
  char buffer[count] = { '\0' };
  struct timeval start_time;
  gettimeofday(&start_time, NULL);
  off_t ret = lseek(fd, offset, SEEK_SET);
  if (ret != offset) {
    perror("lseek error");
    close(fd);
    return -1;
  }
  ret = read(fd, buffer, count);
  if (ret != count) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Failed reading all: %ld\n", ret);
    close(fd);
    return -1;
  }
  struct timeval end_time;
  gettimeofday(&end_time, NULL);
  printf("tv_sec: %ld, tv_usec: %ld\n",
         end_time.tv_sec - start_time.tv_sec,
         end_time.tv_usec - start_time.tv_usec);
  close(fd);
  return 0;
}