4.2: Disk performance

I mentioned earlier that disk drives are slow. On current HDDs, the average time to read a block from disk to memory might be 5–25 ms (see https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_performance_characteristics). SSDs are faster, taking 25 µs to read a 4 KiB block and 250 µs to write one (see http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssd#Controller).

To put these numbers in perspective, let’s compare them to the clock cycle of the CPU. A processor with clock rate 2 GHz completes one clock cycle every 0.5 ns. The time to get a byte from memory to the CPU is typically around 100 ns. If the processor completes one instruction per clock cycle, it would complete 200 instructions while waiting for a byte from memory.

In one microsecond, it would complete 2000 instructions, so while waiting 25 µs for a byte from an SSD, it would complete 50,000.

In one millisecond, it would complete 2,000,000 instructions, so while waiting 20 ms for a byte from a HDD, it might complete 40 million. If there’s nothing for the CPU to do while it waits, it would be idle. That’s why the operating system generally switches to another process while it is waiting for data from disk.

The gap in performance between main memory and persistent storage is one of the major challenges of computer system design. Operating systems and hardware provide several features intended to “fill in” this gap:

• Block transfers: The time it takes to load a single byte from disk is 5–25 ms. By comparison, the additional time to load an 8 KiB block is negligible. So systems generally try to read large blocks each time they access the disk.
• Prefetching: Sometimes the operating system can predict that a process will read a block and start loading it before it is requested. For example, if you open a file and read the first block, there is a good chance you will go on to read the second block. The operating system might start loading additional blocks before they are requested.
• Buffering: As I mentioned, when you write a file, the operating system stores the data in memory and only writes it to disk later. If you modify the block several times while it is in memory, the system only has to write it to disk once.
• Caching: If a process has used a block recently, it is likely to use it again soon. If the operating system keeps a copy of the block in memory, it can handle future requests at memory speed.

Some of these features are also implemented in hardware. For example, some disk drives provide a cache that stores recently-used blocks, and many disk drives read more than one block at a time, even if only one is requested.

These mechanisms generally improve the performance of programs, but they don’t change the behavior. Usually programmers don’t have to think about them, with two exceptions: (1) if the performance of a program is unexpectedly bad, you might have to know something about these mechanisms to diagnose the problem, and (2) when data is buffered, it can be harder to debug a program. For example, if a program prints a value and then crashes, the value might not appear, because it might be in a buffer. Similarly, if a program writes data to disk and then the computer loses power, the data might be lost if it is in a cache and not yet on disk.