iOS and macOS™ Performance Tuning: Cocoa®, Cocoa Touch®, Objective-C®, and Swift™

11. I/O: Measurement and Tools

Measuring I/O is even harder than measuring memory consumption. Most of the time, interesting events will be those where nothing is happening; the system is simply waiting for some external event such as the hard disk head moving to the right location. In addition, the whole operating system is designed purposely to make I/O measurement nonrepeatable—er, I mean, to optimize I/O, with lots of global shared state such as caches and disk layout. Even worse, while there are techniques for controlling these variables, they usually also lead to nonrepresentative measurements because the optimizations are absolutely necessary for normal operations.

To illustrate, we will use the short program from Example 11.1 that just ...