I noticed in sysctl.conf that the vfs.max_read value was set for 16.
But everthing I read usually has people changing this to some higher value, one place is the wiki:
Usually we see people cranking this to 128! Or as the wiki states, the default in 9.x was 64.
Makes me wonder if 16 is the best value for usb sticks, rather than those higher values?
At any rate, I’m going to double it here to 32 just to keep a cool head about it and see what happens.
DSBmc notes:
I’m not exactly sure this is related, but occasionally I’m seeing where DBmc icon is not showing up in the tint bar.
It works if manually started from the menus, but I’ll keep an eye on this and see if I can correlate some sort of relationship to me changing the stock vfs.read_max=16 that comes with NomadBSD 1.4 to something like 32 or even 64.
Not sure this is related, so don’t quote me. 
Time for BONNIE++
How cool! NomadBSD already has bonnie++ installed, which is a new tool for me.
I’m still getting familiar with it for my UFS operations primarily, and while I’m not too particularly concerned about exact latency numbers, I just want to see if the vfs.read_max sysctl is helping or hurting.
I’m using bonnie++ not so much for specific latency numbers, beyond just looking to see how different values of vfs.read_max sysctl taking it beyond the default of 16 hurts or helps when running UFS usb sticks.
It’s a new tool for me and I’m not an expert at deciphering the real-world values taking into consideration ram, usb sticks etc. I’ll leave that to the pros.
In the meantime, I’ve gone back to the NomadBSD default value of 16 for now.