Thanks for the quick replies!
The reason I encountered this was due to the fact that I noticed some discrepencies in the performance of my system. Maybe someone here can help me...
I have a system that has to read large amounts of text from the hard disk (like I said earlier). Usually, it is multithreaded, so there are multiple threads vying for disk access. I've heard that on many applications, multi-threading can significantly improve speed.
However, on my system, it seems to degrade speed by about 10-20% My theory is that as the different threads are swapped in and out, the disk must move from one read position to another. Therefore, the speed degradation is due to seek times while the read head is moving. Does this sound reasonable?
I talked to a colleague of mine, and he suggested adjusting the buffer sizes. He said that larger buffer sizes could significantly improve speed. Would it solve my problem? Would I be better off just running everything in serial rather than in parallel?
I guess I should run some empirical tests to make sure, but I'd love any input or advice.