yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Asus Transformer TF700] BxMxK:
yes... changed cache to show show that the hardware random write is fixable by software in the form of cache. SSD's are inherently bad at writing small amounts of data. known fact. Not a good measure of "actual" performance since the tf700's file system is cached at 2048k by default.

PhotoShop? Don't think so. Ran another one a little while ago when I got home. This time on Performance Mode and turned off force gpu rendering (not sure if it was on when I did last one)

Total: 6052

CPU: 14931

Mem: 4024

I/O: 9066

2D: 177

3D: 2060

for reference... a cursory google image search showed the best nexus 7 benchmark w/numbers (the 2GHz overclock was only bars.. no numbers)

Nexus 7 @ 1.64GHz (overclocked and a different kernel)

Total	7130

CPU	15753

Mem	4001

I/O	11582

2D	1258

3D	3056

Sysctl settings I've changed:

file-max=1048576

lease-break-time=40

pipe-max-size=4194304

max_queued_events=32000

max_user_instances=256

nfs_congestion_kb=63872

dirty_background_ratio=5

dirty_expire_centisecs=3000

dirty_ratio=10

dirty_writeback_centisec=3000

min_free_order_shift=1

swappiness=1

vfs_cache_pressure=10

net.core.rmem_max=0.50

net.core.wmem_max=0.50

(forgot to take a picture of the last two)

My mount info from terminal:

rootfs / rootfs rw,noatime 0 0

tmpfs /dev tmpfs rw,noatime,mode=755 0 0

devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noatime,mode=600 0 0

proc /proc proc rw,noatime 0 0

sysfs /sys sysfs rw,noatime 0 0

debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,noatime 0 0

none /acct cgroup rw,relatime,cpuacct 0 0

tmpfs /mnt/asec tmpfs rw,noatime,mode=755,gid=1000 0 0

tmpfs /mnt/obb tmpfs rw,noatime,mode=755,gid=1000 0 0

none /dev/cpuctl cgroup rw,relatime,cpu 0 0

/dev/block/mmcblk0p1 /system ext4 rw,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered,noauto_da_alloc 0 0

/dev/block/mmcblk0p8 /data ext4 rw,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered,noauto_da_alloc 0 0

/dev/block/mmcblk0p2 /cache ext4 rw,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered,noauto_da_alloc 0 0

tmpfs /Removable tmpfs rw,relatime,mode=755,gid=1000 0 0

/dev/fuse /mnt/sdcard fuse rw,nodiratime,relatime,user_id=1023,groud_id=1023,default_permissions,allow_other 0 0

/dev/block/mmcblk0p8 /data/local/data ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered,noauto_da_alloc 0 0

browser /data/data/com.android.browser tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0

My knowledge of linux is sorely lacking. If I could get stupid journaling turned off it would go faster.

Anywho. Believe what you want.

The S/W I/O management is what's broken.

If I had enough free time away from the military I'd learn my way around linux a little better and fix it myself because I've got a pretty good idea how to do it.
[Asus Transformer TF700] woodsonmh:
I don'tunderstand why the blue area is so small. On all my test cpu is a lot faster than anything else on the charts.

Woody
[Asus Transformer TF700] newellj79:
1238... Running cm10 with performance mode (1.7ghz max). Not to good me thinks.
[Asus Transformer TF700] BxMxK:
that does seem low for balanced mode... then again i was a little drunk last night... could've been in power save for all i know :silly:
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
Someone asked about IO on the TF700KL (German LTE S4 version). The S4 has a dedicated IO controller as a component of the SoC. The TF700KL gets a 6250 IO score in Quadrant. So there you have it. ;)

Here's a review of the TF700KL. The benchmarks are at 10:43.

[YOUTUBE]rXpW2F-n_GM[/YOUTUBE]
[Asus Transformer TF700] okantomi:
Very interesting...I like the way you're thinking...
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
I just have a hard time believing that the ASUS developers spend enough time to optimize things. One thing good is that they use near stock OS, but that may be because 1. They want to make sure they can roll out update quick. OR 2. They just don't want to optimize for hardware. So what you are trying to do make sense to me. Clearly, there is a point that you make system unstable, and introduce new problems but I have almost no doubt there are space that you can fiddle and get better overall performance without affecting anything on the user end (simply user won't see the degrade portion.

Have you noticed any change in actual user experience? Stability, speed etc?
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
Since every Teg3 TF-series tablet suffers from the same IO issues, and the problems have been in existence for ten months, why do you think no one's been able to resolve them? It’s one thing to hypothesize and another to see an actual solution.

P.S. –Thank you for serving our Country.
[Asus Transformer TF700] 0x000:
i'd just be careful regarding optimiziations of the ext4 filesystem in regards to noauto_da_alloc or barrier=0 or removing the journal because in case of a random reboot (which seems to happen to quite a lot of people) you'll very likely loose data / have corrupted files. good example is my old -slow as hell- galaxy 3 (not s3 :) phone which has some optimizations within the custom rom i'm using. my child often drops this phone if i have it lying around and i have many apps now that don't work anymore and FC now because of the sudden loss of battery :)

of course, the patched libsqlite which disables sync (e.g. in zeus rom; also see the patch description here: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1691669) may also very likely destroy the affected sqlite database in case of a random reboot. if you never had random reboots i guess it'll be fine though, just don't let it run out of battery :cowboy:
[Asus Transformer TF700] BxMxK:
I think about fsync like this. Maybe disabling it for a huge server application with tons and tons of database data that needs to be available 24/7 would be a bit brash. As for the tiny little db's that are stored on my tab, the write cycle can be completed on those so quickly (even with horrible IO) after fsync is disabled that the odds of ever crashing during a db write aren't very large in my opinion.

I've never had reboots so can't speculate as to their cause... and therefore have yet to be concerned about it in regards to fsync
[Asus Transformer TF700] chriskwarren:
I'm going to see how the scores change with JB: this person on the TF201 got "3,3k in performance mode":

http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=32077088&postcount=5
[Asus Transformer TF700] woodsonmh:
That doesn't seem like a very good score. On quadrant chart prime has score of about 4200.

Woody
[Asus Transformer TF700] jtrosky:
I completely agree with you on this. In my opinion, if your device is randomly rebooting, *that* is what you need to be concerned with (and get corrected) - not the disabling of fsync!

I've absolutely had no random reboots or complete crashes with my TF700, so it's not a hardware issue causing those, so they can be resolved. Once people fix that issue, I'd highly recommend disabling fsync...
[Asus Transformer TF700] woodsonmh:
For me the low io score is a red herring. Its impossible to say, this is the case for everyone. There seems to be differences between infinity's and users differ in the way they use their tablet. I know file transfers between a pc and tf is extremely slow and i seldom do it. Any more i will use dropbox or memory card for file transfers.

Why a red herring? I just downloaded a 20 min. Hd video, and played it back on my tf. Video playback was excellent. No dropped frames, no jitters, and screen was tf beautiful. While io may not be great it is good enough to do what i want it to without sacrificing quality. My streaming apps all work great. I can stream Amazon through browser and it looks great. Ditto hulu plus. I stream twit tv without a hitch. The reason i don't grab my rooted modified rom, acer 500 more often, who's io score is much better, its screen doesn't look so great. Ok but not great. As my 500 stands its still about 1500 less on quadrant score.

My quadrant scores consistently runs about 4500. I'm rooted stock rom.

Woody
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
That's exactly why people are being misled in to thinking IO is improved just because the SQL tweaks send those specific database scores through the roof and jack the Quadrant IO scores. Getting an "A" in "tiny little database" data transfers and a "D" in disk reads/writes and apps writing to disk still leaves everyone in a not great place. And so far nothing's improved the latter. Bounties are permissible on XDA and if you think a s/w IO manager is a possible solution maybe you guys should start one to get someone to code a solution. Between the multiple TF forums participation would probably be high.

---------- Post added at 08:26 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:10 AM ----------

The Infinity's are performing the same (IO wise) but you're 100% correct in that the way people use them will impact their IO experience. IO throughput isn't great but, using your examples of doing one thing at a time, can be fine. Concurrent reads/writes are the big challenge and people that have a lot of background processes and syncs running are much more likely to have IO issues. People complaining about problems are what started the benchmark discussions, not vice versa. This goes back to what someone said earlier about being happy. If in the way they use their device none of this affects some people they have no reason to be unhappy. So, at least to me, this thread isn't about "good" vs. "evil;" it's just letting people know they could have an issue depending on what they do with their device. But let's be honest, in late-2012 and with the TF700 selling at $499 the reality is we shouldn't be having this conversation at all. A dedicated h/w IO controller is probably no more than $5.
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
Some early reports from Prime users that got the JB update and have been playing with IO...
[Asus Transformer TF700] woodsonmh:
Thanks for the insights. If only, $5, well I could have handled that. I learned on my prime to hit kill switch in between apps. White list a few and kill the rest. I do this on infiity but not s regularly. I know on android you don't need to this for memory, i do it to limit background operations. It is my opinion that prime and infinity have trouble handling background apps. It is not uncommon to see a background app running away using cpu cycles. Tapatalk might normally use 5 to 6%. I've seen it as a background app using 50% cpu. This happened a lot on prime and not so much on infinity. I set watchdog to kill at 20%.

Woody
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
As several of us said several times, benchmark is just benchmark. The most important part is how things play at the end. Besides if some users are seeing improvement in IO of 20-50%, then if same happens to Infinity that's like RL benchmark of 30-40 for most of us, which is reasonably good number but again I don't think we should get bogged down with numbers.

So exact same thread that BarryH took quotes, I see followings:

Yes. I only extracted positive comments here just as BarryH sort of did negative comments. The difference here?

1. Subjectivity OR

2. Benchmark vs. Actual user experience

Originally I thought main reason why IO issue came up as people's attention was because of frequent ANR, which people linked to possibly IO as a cause. So if that issue is fixed do we still care? But personally, improvement in browser speed is most hoping feature.

In any event, you can turn table in either way by taking selected sample or changing the measurement. To me, end user experience seem far more important measurement than the benchmark score.
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
I only pulled the comments directly related to IO which is the topic we're discussing. After the TF700 gets JB there will be hundreds of posts discussing general performance.

It always is. It is ironic however that the only people that question benchmarks are those that aren't happy with the results. ;)
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
Well... That's so true... :(
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
From Prime forum, http://www.starseven.at/2012/09/28/benchmark-asus-transformer-prime-tf-201-mit-jelly-bean/

The above is new benchmark result with Jellybean. No Androbench, or RL benchmark; however, what is interesting here for the purpose of this thread is that look at IO score on Antutu. It is 700's. My Infinity is 500's. Previously Prime was 250 in May. And Galaxy Note is 700's as well according to my quick google search.

Again, for those of you who are into benchmark scores, there is a hope and yet another proof that software can change benchmarks. But in the end what we notice as a end user experience is everything. :)

References:

Prime http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/05/09/head-to-head-asus-transformer-prime-vs-acer-iconia-tab-a510/

Galaxy Note 10.1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e3PrmQImVs at 1:32
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
Today's report from users. Shinzz is pretty cool and is leading the IO discussion on the Prime forum. He, Demandarin, and I go way back. His viewpoint is generally pretty balanced.

Here's their Quadrant and RL scores after a day on JB. Quadrant's a weak IO test and RL only tests SQL which only affects in-app databases. I asked them to post an AndroBench report. My take on shinzz's "settle in" comment is that when they first ran the tests there weren't a lot of background processes going on. Once the installed apps and system processes re-initialized themselves the increase in background IO calls is what brought the scores down and kept them there. Just a theory.
[Asus Transformer TF700] okantomi:
HoushaSen, As you can see, I'm using the unofficial CM10 9/25 build on my Infinity...been using it for several days, no recent reboot, background processes settled in and running...and these are my antutu scores (performance mode on performance governor, so flat-out 1700 all the way):

Total score: 13463

CPU: 9879

GPU: 999

RAM: 2681

I/O: 804

This rom does not have fsync disabled, so no crazy-fast SQlite performance.

I'm not sure how this stacks up against other Infinities (stock ICS/custom ICS/JB).
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
AndroBench?
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
Despite I have been placing quite few comment recently regarding to this matter, I am not big fan of benchmark, but having said that since that is what this thread is about and if nothing else it's fun to talk about, I posted above comment based on the post from Prime forum.

I think your IO score is pretty good in Antutu as far as I can tell. My Infinity as I said is only 500 and I basically have pure stock with root just to install browser2ram, but nothing else other than bloatware turned off. Not even CPU governor. Based on my google search, even Galaxy Note 10.1 had only 700's IO score. As for Prime it was as low as 250 at one point by Andropolice site.

So if Antutu is more reflective of real life (which I am not saying it is) but if that's the case, then yeah essentially you should not be feeling any IO issue. How is your actual experience? Do you remember some actual user experience that you felt like it was surely due to IO? If so, do you feel like has that got improved?

Barry

Would you mind sharing your Antutu score on Note with IO? Because the Youtube clip I linked may be old one or perhaps had some special thing running in background. I just like to see what you get on your stock rom with latest firmware.

Thanks
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
AnTuTu, Vellamo, and Quadrant are overall performance benchmarks that run four simple IO tests - 1) disk reads, 2) disk writes, 3) SQL reads, and 4) SQL writes. 50% of their IO scores are based on SQL which, so far, is the only score that's been improved with s/w on the TF700. AndroBench is specifically an IO benchmark and runs eleven tests of which only three are SQL. No matter how good the IO scores people have posted in AnTuTu, Vellamo, and Quadrant their non-SQL scores in AndroBench have been the same or worse. So because of its depth, AndroBench is a truer measurement of IO performance. If everyone is going to go by "feel" which is totally subjective and based on individual use there's really no reason to have these detailed discussions. Likewise, if everyone just wants to feel good, pick the benchmark that makes you the happiest and only quote that one. But remember they're all testing the same thing so if the results are off it isn't that the h/w is performing any differently, it's the depth and thoroughness of the test.

Anand's (an engineer) comments pretty much sums up how easy it is for even experts to be unaware of Asus' IO issues in cursory testing.

For the first time, in our Nexus 7 review, I started seriously looking at integrated storage performance of tablets and smartphones. I've casually done this in the past, but users complaining of poor system responsiveness with background writes on ASUS' Transformer Prime/Pad series demanded something a little more thorough.​

He added this which is truly the crux of the problem and why some people aren't bothered by it. And whether the simple tests in AnTuTu, Velammo, and Quadrant highlight or not it's still there.

Sequential read/write speed isn't bad, but it's the random write speed that's really a problem. We're talking about write speeds of a couple hundred KB/s.

Remember what I said earlier about how multitasking can take an otherwise sequential IO stream and make it look fairly random? I suspect the low random write performance is one reason we're seeing significant slowdowns with background IO.

Not all NAND controllers do well with concurrent reads and writes, which could be another contributing factor to poor performance.

Note that for light usage this isn't a problem.

Similar to the first generation of affordable MLC SSDs for PCs, as long as you're doing a lot of reading you'll be ok. It's really for the heavier usage models that this is a problem.

On a tablet however, simple background installation or downloading of files counts as heavy these days. The real solution to this problem is to integrate better NAND flash controllers on-board, or even onto the SoC itself.

​

One X on the left, Note on the right. You'll also notice the test gave the One X and Note the same points (150) for SD card write even though they were 5MB's apart and only a two point difference when they were off 10GB in reads. And SQL is the 430/550 number shown under "Database IO."
[Asus Transformer TF700] HoushaSen:
Thanks Barry_H for quick check.

This is extremely interesting test result for me. As basically, on the Antutu both of your devices are essentially same as the my infinity or Custom Rom installed infinity of the okantomi's is better than either of your devices.

Just as you said, this is secondary to the fact the IO test Antutu performing is very simplified one. However, as you said before if benchmark test is something to trust of then, Antutu is most commonly used benchmark so why would we not assume this is indeed most reflective of overall benchmark in real life?

In the end, I think all benchmarks are flawed in one way or other simply because if one benchmark is purely testing hardware, then that benchmark score should not be able to be changed no matter what you do on software. So this simply speaks, there is software component on the benchmark that is assessed. This is though exactly expected as no hardware can run without software. So essentially comes back to conclusion, software can change overall performance.

In any event, I hope the improvement in IO score reflects real life experience. I know one test I can do for myself, which is to try to run Horn while downloading 1GB+ file in the background. I wonder if you can try that on Galaxy Note 10.1?
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
Because the problems like Anand described are what caused people to investigate and why we're having conversations like this one. Issues people were experiencing is what started everyone running IO benchmarks, not vice versa. Out of a total score of 12,411 on the Note, only 895 (7%) "points" are the IO numbers. Their weighting of both the importance and differences of IO is obviously very low. If a home pregnancy test gives a false negative are you really not pregnant? ;) Also, consider this. The TF700 is based on a design that's over a year old. Other than a better Teg3 chip, all the other components are the same as the Prime. All the components of the Note have advanced compared to both the OG G-Tab and G-Tab 2. To expect that not to affect a performance comparison isn't practical.

Let's put it this way, no matter what any of the benchmarks say, if the background IO problems go away the problem's solved. If they don't, they aren't. To Anand's point, light users probably never experienced them in the first place. I have two Exchange e-mail accounts and GMail set up to download complete message copy as well as attachments via push. In Anand's example, every time I received an e-mail I'd experience stalls or hesitation in whatever else I was doing. Same thing with social media syncs. The less people do in the background the less of an issue this is. Just because you're not personally experiencing them based on the way you use your device doesn't mean they don't exist and that others won't experience them.

I'd love to but with different networks and other variables the results wouldn't mean much. It would be great if someone with a Note and TF700 could test them side-by-side.

P.S. - My One X was below 15% battery life when I ran AnTuTu so the CPU was throttled. Here's the accurate score. I'm surprised no one said anything. That was a pretty piss poor result.
[Asus Transformer TF700] JamesRC:
Can anyone post AndroBench runs on the One X, Note and/or TF700 pre- and post-JB? I read this is more reliable but there are few AndroBench runs.

Cheers
[Asus Transformer TF700] BarryH_GEG:
You're way overthinking this my friend. Simply, regardless of brand, OS version, custom UI, NAND capacity, processor speed, et. al., only Asus TF-series tablets perform this way. Using logic to explain it away would be more appropriate if the problem was wider than Asus products. But it doesn't appear to be from the devices I follow. It certainly isn't with Samsung and HTC devices and they're the two biggest Android device manufacturers. A more apt example of what's going on is "a chain is only as good as its weakest link." For example, the ****ty AnTuTu score I posted for my One X when it was throttled to 1GHz went up dramatically when retested at 1.5GHz whereas the IO portion went up two points. So clearly CPU/GPU has little or no impact on IO, at least as far as AnTuTu’s concerned. At the end of the day nothing anyone's done with s/w (so far) has caused the wrties, especially random which are exceptionally low, to budge. And that's the weakest link.

I've done some comparisons to the Note but HoushaSen asked me to compare Asus' tablets against each other. Once the TF700 gets JB I’ll do a before and after on all three of them and include Zeus on 4.0.4 also. With JB coming so soon it doesn't make sense to do it now and then do it again later.