I thought folks might be interested in this... note in particular the
comment about linux.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 26, 2006 11:34:12 PM EDT
To: leo huang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Is the fsync() fake on FreeBSD6.1?
On Tuesday, 27 June 2006 at 10:18:47 +0800, leo huang wrote:
Hi,
I benchmarked MySQL 4.1.18 on FreeBSD 6.1 and Debian 3.1 using
Super Smack
1.3 some days ago.
...
The result surprise me. The MySQL Performance on FreeBSD6.1 is about
10 times of on Debian3.1??and the output of iostat also shows it.
I know that MySQL uses fsync() to flush both the data and log files
at default when using innodb engine(
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/innodb-parameters.html). Our
evaluating computer only has a 10000RPM SCSI hard disk. I think it
can do about 200 sequential fsync() calls per second if the fsync()
is real.
Is the fsync() on FreeBSD6.1 fake?
My understanding from the last time I looked at the code was that
fsync does the right thing:
The fsync() system call causes all modified data and
attributes of fd to
be moved to a permanent storage device. This normally results
in all in-
core modified copies of buffers for the associated file to be
written to
a disk.
This is not the case for Linux, where fsync syncs the entire file
system. That could explain some of the performance difference, but
not all of it. I suppose it's worth noting that, in general, people
report much better performance with MySQL on Linux than on FreeBSD.
I mean than the data is only written to the drives memory and so can
be lost if power goes down.
I don't believe that fsync is required to flush the drive buffers. It
would be nice to have a function that did, though.
And how I can confirm this?
Trial and error?
Greg
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