[NTLUG:Discuss] Disk I/O timings.

[David Neeley]

Isn't it true that for many drive requests, the entire file is not read 
during the first request? Is it not also true that the drive reads *more* 
than the request requires so that subsequent requests for data in that 
immediate vacinity are more likely to be in cache?

Unless Linux is quite different than other systems, the initial access 
often does not read the entire file into system memory--cache is the 
enabler for this.

At 12:41 AM 12/7/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Yes - that's true.  However, I hardly ever access a file more than once
>so the caching isn't really giving me any benefit - or harming me very
>much (except that it confuses my ability to understand what's going on!)