> On 1999-Oct-06 09:55:26 +1000, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> >I've seen softupdates nearly eliminate disk io for systems that used
> >an abmornal amount of temp files, but the fact that it can destabilize
> >a system worries me greatly.
> 
> What do you mean by `destabilize'?  There are bugs in softupdates
> which mean that an application may receive ENOSPC when writing to a
> filesystem even though space on that filesystem has been recently
> freed.  Any application that cannot handle this situation is _broken_.
[.....]

:-]  You're joking right ?  Most applications don't even *notice* 
the situation let alone handle it.  Whaddaya do when /var/log runs 
out of space ?  Show me an app that handles it.....

I guess you can argue the case, but in real life, running out of any 
machine resource can cause all sorts of possibly unrecoverable 
problems.  IMHO the best way to deal with it in a generic way is to 
have the give-me-the-resource function block if it really thinks it's 
a temporary thing.

In the case of softupdtes, I'd be surprised if it couldn't easily 
figure out that the problem is *probably* transient and block, but 
of course to figure out exactly how transient it is would probably 
involve about the same amount of effort as just processing the 
softupdates ``todo'' list there and then.

Anyway, I'll shut up now :-I

-- 
Brian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>                        <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
      <http://www.Awfulhak.org>                   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !          <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>




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