I am testing out Adaptive Readahead in Linux quite a lot at the minute. ARA offers particular performance improvements to file-reading logic, and should give significant performance wins on database servers.

I now have a stable enough kernel package for Debian users who may want to try it out. The kernel package uses the same defaults as etch, but there’s a version bump to 2.6.21, and of course I have turned on the ARA features!

Download the Debian Adaptive Readahead package and install with dpkg -i

Please post a comment if you try it out and have anything to report.