On Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 11:25:23AM GMT, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2019-11-30, Raymond, David <david.raym...@nmt.edu> wrote: > > I am switching to OpenBSD from Linux and I have questions about the > > use of softdep and noatime in mounting disks. I have a variety of > > systems with a mix of SSDs and rotating disks. > > > > Softdep seems to have some advantages in speeding file access, but it > > is not the default. Are there any downsides in using softdep? > > Yes, that's why it's not on by default. Uses more memory, delays freeing > space when removing files, tends to cause a kernel panic if the drive > goes unresponsive (which the drive might have otherwise recovered from > after a delay). It's not that much of an improvement with SSDs anyway, > it's most useful with drives that are slow at random writes (higher > seek times). > > > On SSDs in particular, is it worth setting noatime to reduce the > > number of disk writes? > > In general, not really unless your drives are slow, or you often do > reads across a large set of files and don't have anything that cares > about access times on those files. >
I second that - an old Asus Eee PC got quite usable once I've enabled softdep. I don't enable it on anything else any more, though. Regards, Raf
