Time to increase MAXPHYS?

On January 24, 1998, in what was later renumbered to SVN r32724, dyson_at_
wrote:
> Add better support for larger I/O clusters, including larger physical
> I/O.  The support is not mature yet, and some of the underlying implementation
> needs help.  However, support does exist for IDE devices now.

and increased MAXPHYS from 64 kB to 128 kB.  Is it time to increase it again,
or do we need to wait at least two decades between changes?

This is hurting performance on some systems; in particular, EC2 "io1" disks
are optimized for 256 kB I/Os, EC2 "st1" (throughput optimized spinning rust)
disks are optimized for 1 MB I/Os, and Amazon's NFS service (EFS) recommends
using a maximum I/O size of 1 MB (and despite NFS not being *physical* I/O it
seems to still be limited by MAXPHYS).

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid