On 2009-08-03, Jan Stary <h...@stare.cz> wrote: > 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.
interesting, I don't know why that is, then. > 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? when you update an already-installed system, loads.
