Re: general speed differences between 4.1.1-RELEASE and 4.3-RELEASE

[Mike Silbersack]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Doug Barton wrote:

>       The current mood (which I agree with) is to make softupdates the default
> after installation. The problem with the combo of write caching and
> softupdates is that if the power actually goes off the meta-data writes
> that softupdates postpones and are further postponed by the write cache
> will never happen, therefore leaving the file system in a potentially
> unrecoverable state.

That mood is nice in theory, but doesn't seem to fit practice.  My boxes
are on UPSes, and I have trouble remembering the last time the power went
out.  On the other hand, I can clearly remember the last panic
on my -current box which required a manual fsck to repair (yesterday).
And yes, write caching was disabled on the box at the time.  It seems to
me that we're assuming hardware write caching is some evil villan which
will steal our data without any evidence.  At the same time, we're putting
blind trust in filesystems to always DTRT.

And stuck in the middle is a growing number of people who are seeing a
noticeable slowdown with 4.3, and will start telling their friends that
FreeBSD is slow.

Mike "Silby" Silbersack


To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message