Weird Fortran i/o?

[David Hinds]

In article <9105031951.AA02478 at smaug.physics.mcgill.ca> igraham at SMAUG.PHYSICS.MCGILL.CA (Ian Graham) writes:
>
>A user on our system was checking benchmarks for system i/o on 
>IRIS/SUN/HP9000/DECSTATION and came up with the following quirky 
>results: (THe code is given at the bottom)  THe program writes
>100000 bunches of 4 integers into a direct access fie, rewinds, 
>and reads 'em all back.   Here are the results for a 4D-25:
>
>START-TIME         0.0100      0.0700
>IO WRITE           8.9400      4.7600
>IO READ           26.4600    353.0300 <<---!!!!!!
>
>So what gives?  Why should it take 5 MINUTES to read some data written
>in 5 SECONDS!

    I don't know why reads in particular are so slow, but my experience
was that ALL fortran I/O was really slow.  I didn't make detailed timings,
but I remember that one program which took about an hour to read a large
unformatted file ran in about 3 minutes when I replaced a single Fortan
READ statement with a C function to read a short string of bytes.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds at cb-iris.stanford.edu