Setting readahead (RA from now on) appropriately is a contentious subject. There are a lot of variables involved, but in my particular case I am setting out to minimize those variables, get a baseline, and have a reasonable idea of what to expect out of this configuration: Environment: Amazon EC2 Instance Size: m3.xlarge (4 vCPU, 15GiB RAM) Disk Config: Single EBS Volume, 1000 PIOPS The testing I am going to be doing is pretty detailed, and intended for use in a future whitepaper, so I wanted to get some prep done and figure out exactly what I was dealing with here before I moved forward.