On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 09:19:37AM -0700, Tim Howe wrote:
> Wow, really? That's a little frightening about the soft updates. I
> just started using softdep on all my partitions. Is this not a good
> idea for a workstation? I did notice that my source tree expanded a bit
> faster... How recently did you experience these problems wityh soft
> updates?
>
I wouldn't worry about it, especially not on a workstation, unless you
work really, really fast and are doing a whole lot of deleteing/creating
all the time. My server was crashing during cvs updates, but could
always recover. OK, /tmp was usually screwy afterwords, but, who
cares what's on /tmp after a reboot anyway. I replaced the disk
and the crashes stopped; darn WD garbage.
softdep is cool. I recently moved my mp3s from my workstation to my
server. I rm -rf'd ~/mp3, the prompt came back immediately, the disk
light flickered for a split second. ls didn't show the directory. Then
in quick little bursts, the disk light would come on. Neat!
$ man mount
...
softdep
...
Instead of metadata being written immediately, it is written in
an ordered fashion to keep the on-disk state of the filesysten
consistent. The result is significant speedups for file create/
delete operations.
...
The downside is a crash during heavy create/delete can be messy. As in
the example above, it's probably the drive or disk contoller's fault if
there's a crash during heavy disk I/O, so the crashes may have actually
saved me from completely losing the disk anyway.
If your already the paranoid type and mount filesystems you don't need to
write to (very often) read only anyway, there's really not too much to
worry about.
--
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
