Speeding up file I/O: mmap() vs. read()

Question

I have a Linux application that reads 150-200 files (4-10GB) in parallel. Each file is read in turn in small, variably sized blocks, typically less than 2K each.

I c

Answer 1

Perhaps using the readahead system call might help, if your program can predict in advance the file fragments it wants to read (but this is only a guess, I could be wrong).

And I think you should tune your application, and perhaps even your algorithms, to read data in chunk much bigger than a few kilobytes. Can't than be half a megabyte instead?