Or maybe as an optional argument to the put operation that requests whether
or not the blob write should be flushed or not, with a config option to
define what happens in the default case when the caller doesn't specify one
way or another?

- Ted

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Brad Fitzpatrick <[email protected]> wrote:

> I've actually been thinking that sync should be an explicit part of the
> protocol so higher levels can decide the atomicity that they require.
>
> Then we make everything async by default, but all blob storage
> implementations must support a sync (or "Flush"?) operation. And then
> camput and other tools be sure to do a sync at the end before they return
> success. Or maybe they even have a flag (defaulting to --sync=true?) to let
> the caller control.
>
> Thoughts? And on naming?
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 12:21 PM, Theodore Ts'o <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, October 2, 2016 at 2:48:31 PM UTC-4, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>>
>>>  (Especially since if you crash before the permanode is written, the
>>> client is going to have to restart the whole backup from scratch anyway.)
>>>
>>
>> One thought --- as an automated heuristic, if the blobserver receives a
>> stream of unsigned blobs, it doesn't need to fsync() them.    After all,
>> any objects which aren't referenced by a permanode are subject to GC
>> treatment.   So if you crash and then run a GC, any immutable, non-signed
>> objects that were uploaded just before the crash would be GC'ed anyway.
>>  Hence, there's no point to treat them as precious objects that have to be
>> fsync'ed before the client upload is acknowledged.  So what could be done
>> is when the first signed object is received, the blob server could send
>> down a sync(2) command, and then write all of the signed objects using
>> fsync(2).
>>
>> If we did this, the next obvious optimization would be to tune the
>> writeback interval for the disk in question to be 2-3 minutes, instead of
>> the usual 30 seconds.   I noticed that objects were getting written as
>> loose files, and then repacked into pack file approximately every 2 minutes
>> or so.    All modern file systems do delayed allocation, which means that
>> if we're not fsync'ing the loose files, they won't get flushed to disk, and
>> so if they are written into the packed file and then get deleted within the
>> writeback interval, the loose files will never get written to disk.    This
>> will double camlistore's effective write throughput to the disk, since we
>> won't be writing each byte being backed up twice --- once to the loose
>> file, and a second time to the pack file.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> - Ted
>>
>> P.S.  I assume there are good reasons why we can't just stream the
>> objects straight to the pack file, which is what git does?    I noticed
>> there were some comments about wanting to rearrange the objects so they
>> would be in an optimal order for later access.  Is that right?
>>
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