Read and mmap are both fundamentally important system calls, used to access bytes in files. Read uses the standard file descriptor to access files while mmap maps files to RAM. The purpose of this experiment was to compare performance differences with read when compared to mmap.

1. Randomly generate file content for different file sizes.
2. Calculate file histogram and measure elapsed time - 10 times
3. Write elapsed time, average time and standard deviation to a file.

These tests were conducted on a 5.4.0-77-generic Linux Mint 20.1 system utilizing an Intel Core i7-9750H @ 2.60GHz × 6 with 9.3.0 gcc version.

Clone the project or download it as a zip and then unzip it.

Run

bash script.sh -h

and then use the appropriate flag.

Run

make
./main -h

and then use the appropriate flag.

Note: you can firstly use bash script.sh -c to generate test files.

Buffer sizes are in bytes, time is in milliseconds.

File size: 512B

Better method: read(1024), by 53.33%

File size: 2kB

Better method: read(4096), by 55.40%

File size: 8kB

Better method: read(4096), by 62.71%

File size: 32kB

Better method: read(8192), by 35.06%

File size: 128kB

Better method: read(4096), by 18.47%

File size: 512kB

Better method: read(16384), by 21.99%

File size: 1MB

Better method: read(8192), by 45.03%

File size: 8MB

Better method: mmap, by 1.4%

File size: 32MB

Better method: mmap, by 17.81%

File size: 256MB

Better method: mmap, by 20.21%

File size: 1GB

Better method: mmap, by 20.62%

For smaller files, the read method is faster when compared to the mmap method. That changes with large files - mmap is faster for around 15%.

For smaller files, the most appropriate buffer size would be 4096B or 8192B, which is the same as a page size on the computer used in the experiment. The page size can be found by running getconf PAGE_SIZE.

For larger files, the most suitable buffer size would be 16kB.