> And you also noticed both the number of forks, and the number of
> filesystem synchs (and hence actual physical disk IO) required in this
> process, I guess.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that on any unix system, the file
system cache allows process B to access data written by process A regardless
of whether or not a physical disk synchronization has taken place. The
actual write-to-disk is unimportant, as the file cache already knows what
that file contains. It would be wasteful to access the disk for data
already in cache, where it was put by process A's write.
David
