>Test case: watch "iostat -xnzc 5" while reading from an >optical media, using different block sizes: > >dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0p0 of=/dev/null bs=2k >dd if=/dev/rdsk/c2t1d0p0 of=/dev/null bs=32k > >This SONY DVD RW AW-G170A (and a DVD-RW media) >is reading ~3 MB/sec using 2k read requests, and ~8 MB/sec >when using 32k reads.
While this matters some, the current install process is so inefficient that even though installing from DVD is slower than the network, a network tends to be idle most of the time during the install. (Which isn't surprising as getting 4GB over local net should not take more than between 40 (Gbps) and 400s (100Mbps) but installs take generally a lot longer than 7 minutes; bunzip2 is also so slow that it cannot stream data from any media faster than papertape. Casper
