I suggest to mark this as "fixed".  I did a few simple tests with hdparm -t 
/dev/xxx and while I am not convinced that this is necessarily the best, let on 
alone the only relevant measure of performance, I found no limitation in Karmic 
on a current 250 GB 7200 rpm laptop hard drive with the default setting of 256 
sectors (as Phillip Susi indicated, this is the default for all block devices, 
both LVM and non-LVM).  This agrees with Jack Wasey's observations.  I get ~90+ 
MB/s for readaheads from 64 to 8192 sectors, and I have no reason to believe 
that there are is a setting within that range that would be significantly 
different from the others (on my system, with the hdparm test; there is some 
variability in repeated measurements even with the same settings).  At 32 
sectors there is a slight drop to ~85 MB/s, and settings of 2 and 8 sectors 
give ~27 and ~40 MB/s, respectively, which shows that the readahead settings do 
have an effect.  To set the rumor to rest that the lvchange command has no 
effect (which was true in 2004 and perhaps later) - I tried with both lvchange 
-r and blockdev --setra, and they have the same effect - i.e. basically no 
change in performance between 64 and 8192 (highest I have tried), and a drop 
below 32.  (Using blockdev --setra on the physical device a logical volume 
resides on, e.g. /dev/sdxy, rather than of the logical volume itself has no 
effect, by the way.)
Long story short, in my experience the default settings are fine and the 
lvchange command works as expected if you feel the need to change them.  With 
SSD's this may have even less impact.

-- 
very sub-optimal default readahead settings on device and unused readahead 
setting in LVM
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/129488
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