/dev/null is an ACID compliant database

But is /dev/null web scale?

Yes, /dev/null can even power sites like zombo.com

What’s the I/O throughput of /dev/null ?

Single client, I'm getting ~5GB/s, both on an 8-year-old intel server, and on my M1 ARM chip.

However with a single server, it doesn't perfectly linearly scale with multiple clients. I'm getting

1 client: 5GB/s

2 clients: 8GB/s

3 client: 8.7GB/s

I'm easily reaching 30GB/s with a single client:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M status=progress

A second dd process hits the same speed.

My artisanal architecture design uses writes with a few characters and uses unix pipes:

    yes | pv > /dev/null

I hope that in my next rewrite I can advance to larger block sizes.

Interestingly I tried this as well and was disappointed with the results:

  yes $(printf %1024s | tr " " "y") | pv > /dev/null

About the same throughput as letting yes output a single character. I guess Unix pipes are slow.

> I guess Unix pipes are slow.

Or string concatenation, or pipeviewer.