On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 8:41 AM, Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The defaults for vm.dirty_bytes and vm.dirty_background_bytes are, IMO, badly > broken and an insidious source of problems for both regular Linux users and > system administrators. >
It depends on whether you tend to yank out drives without unmounting them, or if you have a poorly-implemented database that doesn't know about fsync and tries to implement transactions across multiple hosts. The flip side of all of this is that you can save-save-save in your applications and not sit there and watch your application wait for the USB drive to catch up. It also allows writes to be combined more efficiently (less of an issue for flash, but you probably can still avoid multiple rounds of overwriting data in place if multiple revisions come in succession, and metadata updating can be consolidated). For a desktop-oriented workflow I'd think that having nice big write buffers would greatly improve the user experience, as long as you hit that unmount button or pay attention to that flashing green light every time you yank a drive. -- Rich
