On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, David Schwartz wrote:
>
> > I have soft updates enabled on a fast machine at work. make
> > installworld can fill up slash even though it has 15M free before the
> > install. I think this is a bug in softupdates that it doesn't reclaim
> > space quickly enough or in overflow situations.
>
> It's really not a bug, it's just a missing feature. There's no requirement
> that a filesystem reclaim empty space immediately. You really shouldn't be
> using fastupdates on nearly full filesystems -- it doesn't handle that
> situation particularly well.
>
> Once could even argue that it's preferable to force the make to abort than
> thrash the filesystem. Though a switch to allow it to thrash might be
> helpful in degenerate cases such as this.
>
> Fastupdates is great for the most common case -- a typical /usr or /home
> partition. That's where you care about write performance anyway.
Actually this becomes quite dangerous when used on tmp filesystems, it
used to be that mfs was a good idea for /tmp, but now softupdates
drastically improves performance... however given that a full /tmp
can kill a system that places us in a dilemma now doesn't it?
*shrug*
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.
Of course I'm trying desperately to understand the softupdates code
right now. :)
-Alfred
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