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Conference ilbbak::ibi_focus

Title:FOCUS, from INFORMATION BUILDERS
Moderator:ZAYIUS::BROUILLETTE
Created:Thu Feb 19 1987
Last Modified:Mon May 05 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:615
Total number of notes:1779

10.0. "Disk Cluster Size" by CAADC::MARSH (Svelte & Petite-nosed) Fri Oct 09 1987 15:11

    I am involved in a project benchmarking FOCUS applications on a
    MicroVAX II and a 3500.  I know next to nothing about FOCUS so please
    excuse my ignorance:
    
    I have been told that FOCUS applications will run faster when the
    data files are on a disk with a disk cluster size of 8 blocks. 
    (I think this has something to do with the files always having
    4Kb = 8 block records).  This sounds a little fishy to me so I thought
    I'd ask the experts.  Is there any truth to this?
    
    	Jeffrey Marsh
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10.1cluster size infoFDCV19::RYANTue Oct 27 1987 17:4216
    The answer is yes.  
    
    FOCUS stores everything in pages of 4096 bytes.  However, VMS/RMS
    reads a single FOCUS page in 3 I/O's - because VMS reads everything
    in 512k chunks.  Thus, a cluster size of 8 means than a single page
    is read with 1 I/O instead of 3.  A cluster size of 16 means that
    two pages are read into memory instead on one.
    
    Large file/database storage is more efficient with larger cluster
    sizes; however the inverse is also true: a larger cluster size means
    that even a one character file is store in the minimum cluster size
    (e.g 8 or 16).  Hence, a one line login.com file on a cluster size
    of 8 would be stored in 8 blocks.
    
    
    -rpr-