Remember, reads or not that important for plot generation.
Write and caching is.
When a nonce is generated your CPU will spike. When the nonce is being written to the disk you will notice your CPU drops to almost an idle state.
Turn on some performance counters and plot them in excel for example. Disk I/O VS CPU.
Something useful if you are using Linux and have 8GB+ Ram:
Turn up the write cache!
(as root):
echo 60 >proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
echo 60 >proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
Slow disk writes are now done in background while your CPU is working again.
