On Jul 30 22:06:41, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> On 2009-07-30, Jan Stary <h...@stare.cz> wrote:
> > is 128M, that's why I use xserv45.tgz and not base45.tgz;
> > and it should have been tar xzpf I guess - does it make
> > a difference? And it shloud be done in single user - but
> > the machine is almost idle, really.)
>
> xserv has a small number of large files, whereas base has a mixture,
> but it has a lot of small files in it. xzpf won't matter for this test,
> but if my theory is right, you will need to write lots of small files
> to see a difference.
I just repeated the same test ten times with xfont45.tgz (is that
a lot of small files?) - with 'async' it consistently takes between
4:00 and 4:10. With 'softdep', it consistently takes between 4:40
and 4:50.
Which leaves the original question unanswered: why is the untaring
during an install so slow when it's async, which I just found to
perform better than softdep on a running system?
> > For some reason (no reason), I have always thought that nothing can
> > be faster than async. What is the rationale for mounting the target
> > filesystems async mounts during an install, anyway?
>
> It's a lot faster than mounting them sync. (ramdisks don't have softdep,
> and also softdep on OpenBSD doesn't free up space from pending deletes
> quickly enough to be a good choice for untarring new OS file sets).
Again I am confused: how much pending deletes are there during an install
when untaring the OS sets?
Jan
