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Sequential I/O on Windows NTâ„¢ 4.0 –
Achieving Top Performance
January 1, 1999
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Download Document
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BibTex
Authors

Jim Gray

Erik Riedel

Catharin van Ingen
Publication Type
Inproceedings

Abstract
Abstract
This paper investigates the most efficient way to read and write large sequential files using the
Windows NTâ„¢ 4.0 File System. The study explores the performance of Intel Pentium Proâ„¢
based memory and IO subsystems, including the processor bus, the PCI bus, the SCSI bus, the
disk controllers, and the disk media. We provide details of the overhead costs at various levels of
the system and examine a variety of the available tuning knobs. The report shows that NTFS outof-the box read and write performance is quite good, but overheads for small requests can be
quite high. The best performance is achieved by using large requests, bypassing the file system
cache, spreading the data across many disks and controllers, and using deep-asynchronous
requests.
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