Understanding I/O Patterns with strace

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STRACE graphicOver at Admin HPC, Intel’s Jeff Layton concludes his series of features on how strace can help you understand the I/O pattern of an application from the application’s perspective.

The last lesson I want to mention is that there is more than one way to do I/O. By switching from the “one-by-one” approach, which wrote the data once the data structure was full, to the “array” method, which created an array of data structures and filled them before writing out the data, I was able to improve my data I/O pattern. With the C code, I could write a much larger set of data at once, rather than hitting the predefined buffer limit. From a theoretical standpoint, the ability to better buffer the data can lead to better throughput performance.

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