/* I/O block size definitions for coreutils Copyright (C) 1989-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . */ /* Include this file _after_ system headers if possible. */ /* sys/stat.h will already have been included by system.h. */ #include "stat-size.h" /* As of Jul 2011, 64KiB is determined to be the minimium blksize to best minimize system call overhead. This can be tested with this script: for i in $(seq 0 10); do bs=$((1024*2**$i)) printf "%7s=" $bs timeout --foreground -sINT 2 \ dd bs=$bs if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null 2>&1 \ | sed -n 's/.* \([0-9.]* [GM]B\/s\)/\1/p' done With the results shown for these systems: system-1 = 1.7GHz pentium-m with 400MHz DDR2 RAM, arch=i686 system-2 = 2.1GHz i3-2310M with 1333MHz DDR3 RAM, arch=x86_64 system-3 = 3.2GHz i7-970 with 1333MHz DDR3, arch=x86_64 blksize system-1 system-2 system-3 --------------------------------------- 1024 734 MB/s 1.7 GB/s 2.6 GB/s 2048 1.3 GB/s 3.0 GB/s 4.4 GB/s 4096 2.4 GB/s 5.1 GB/s 6.5 GB/s 8192 3.5 GB/s 7.3 GB/s 8.5 GB/s 16384 3.9 GB/s 9.4 GB/s 10.1 GB/s 32768 5.2 GB/s 9.9 GB/s 11.1 GB/s 65536 5.3 GB/s 11.2 GB/s 12.0 GB/s 131072 5.5 GB/s 11.8 GB/s 12.3 GB/s 262144 5.7 GB/s 11.6 GB/s 12.5 GB/s 524288 5.7 GB/s 11.4 GB/s 12.5 GB/s 1048576 5.8 GB/s 11.4 GB/s 12.6 GB/s Note that this is to minimize system call overhead. Other values may be appropriate to minimize file system or disk overhead. For example on my current GNU/Linux system the readahead setting is 128KiB which was read using: file="." device=$(df -P --local "$file" | tail -n1 | cut -d' ' -f1) echo $(( $(blockdev --getra $device) * 512 )) However there isn't a portable way to get the above. In the future we could use the above method if available and default to io_blksize() if not. */ enum { IO_BUFSIZE = 64*1024 }; static inline size_t io_blksize (struct stat sb) { return MAX (IO_BUFSIZE, ST_BLKSIZE (sb)); }