Wrzesień 2009

What This All Means
Overall, the results show that multithreaded file I/O can both improve or decrease performance significantly. Keep in mind that an application typically does not only read data, but also processes the data read in a more ore less CPU-intensive way. This leads to different results for every application and even tasks within a application. This also may or may not be the case for writing data. Furthermore, there are very different ways in how and when files will be read or written, as well as different hardware and software configurations that a application will meet. There is no general advice software developers can follow. For example, in one application I measured clearly that using multiple threads per sequential read file increased performance significantly in the 64-bit version. But with the 32-bit version more threads decreased performance on the same machine, the same operating system (Windows XP x64) and the same source code. In another case, where an application opened and appended thousands of files, the best solution was to create 8 threads that did nothing but close files (on a average dual-core machine).