On Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 06:31:12PM -0400, Josh Osborne wrote:
>
> On Friday, June 15, 2001, at 02:37 PM, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 10:23:21PM -0400, Rajappa Iyer wrote:
>>> http://www.sysadminmag.com/articles/2001/0107/0107a/0107a.htm
>>>
>>> Any obvious reasons why FreeBSD performed so poorly for these people?
>>
>> Yes, it's not very difficult to guess why. If you read the tuning(7)
>> manpage in recent 4.x FreeBSD systems you will notice that even the
>> order in which you lay out the partitions on the disks ruding
>> installation time can play a significant role in filesystem speed.
>> Softupdates are disabled by default, and for a good reason too
>> (reliability is more important than raw speed to the people who
>> install FreeBSD for the first time; if it isn't they can always enable
>> softupdates later on). [...]
>
> Is softupdates known to be unreliable, or is it merely a distrust of
> new code?
Matt has explained this better than I could ever do, in his tuning(7)
manpage -- a recent, but very valuable addition to our manpages. To
quote the manpage:
First, softupdates guarentees filesystem consistency in the case
of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a
minute!) behind updating the physical disk. If you crash you may
lose more work then otherwise. Secondly, softupdates delays the
freeing of filesystem blocks. If you have a filesystem (such as
the root filesystem) which is close to full, doing a major update
of it, e.g. make installworld, can run it out of space and cause
the update to fail.
-giorgos
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